links 2-24-11

Socialization in the news:  a look at bullying as an integral part of popularity, a mass socialization process within the schools, a process shaped by the authoritarian, factory system it occurs within even if this approach is mitigated by the many comforts of high economic class status for some.  This homeschool blog offers a take with a lot of thoughts many homeschoolers would share.

Milton Gaither has a post up John Holt's Conversion to Homeschooling:

A few days ago I received an email from Tunya Audain, a Canadian libertarian and home education activist.  I have no way to corroborate her anecdote, but if true it is remarkable.  In my book I explain how Holt’s encounter with Ivan Illich’s CIDOC in 1970 in Mexico was transformative.  Audain’s account, which I reproduce here exactly as she sent it to me, sheds further light on this transformation

Geek Moms has a post on the Curies and the new book by Lauren Redniss as well as a video on making a cyanotype.

A Education Superintendant who wants schools to be able to refuse students

The Bartleby Project urges activism against school tests (one dad's take is here)



Reading Wikipedia on German education, I found this statement (emphasis mine):

Some German teachers' representatives and a number of scientists disputed the PISA findings.^[12] Claiming among other things that the questions have been ill-translated, that the samples drawn in some countries were not representative, that Germans (most of whom had never done a multiple choice tests in their lives before) were discriminated against by the multiple choice questions, that the PISA-questions had no curricular validity and that the PISA was "in fact an IQ-test", which according to them showed that dysgenic fertility was taking place in Germany.^{[13][14][15][16][17][18][19]}