linkage 9-27-10

This idea for a portable playground looks like one that many community learning centers could have their kids make and create.  Homeschooled kids often run businesses and participate meaningfully in their communities:  the only work allowed for kids within the compulsory education system is endless drudgery that is graded and tested daily.

Job Shadowing, Day 1 by an unschooler

Fun at Lexipedia using word graphs

Laura Grace Weldon on Waiting for Superman, Really?

Running out the costs/benefits of a college education: surprise! it has been falling as tuition rises (a longer post soon on this one)

And Greece undertakes reform of higher education.  There's a lot I don't know about Greece but if the word meritocracy always worries me.  I think society needs to make a structure where all talents are utilized --- this is actually essential to a sustainable future --- versus using literacy factories to winnow out people so the small supply of good jobs can be distributed in an organized way.

And the idea that education means the current school system only shows how entrenched is our linkage of education and schools.   Homeschooling, and now the inevitable home college -- or open source higher-level learning -- break this link in the modern mind between schools and education and return to the learner and learning.  From John Holt's 1972 (pre-Internet) essay "Beyond Schooling" in Freedom and Beyond:

"Another consequence of defining education as schooling is that as we put more and more of our educational resources into schools, we have less and less left over for those institutions that are truly open and educative and in which more and more people might learn for themselves."