The Problem and A Solution

This two-part essay was written by my unschooled teen son for his Composition I college class. Zach has been radically unschooled for the past five years and relaxed homeschooled prior to that. He’s never been to school except to play clarinet in a band and beginning this last January he decided he wanted to enroll in a writing course at our local community college. Video games are his number one passion with writing a close second.

In his essay, Zach writes about how it felt to be a child who wanted to please no one more than his mother but also a child who’s passion I did not value or respect. Parts of Zach’s essay were difficult for me to read but I knew the truth of it already and I knew that he had an important message to communicate to the mothers and fathers of the world. The sting of reading about the damage my old ways inflicted on my child were soothed in the knowledge that I’ve seen the error of my ways and have worked hard to repair our relationship I now know the beauty, peace, and extraordinary amount of learning, embracing his interests has brought to both of our lives.

I’ve been thinking about the home education community in England and how different it can be from one area to another.  On a Thursday during term time, my children and I go to Wargrave in Berkshire to attend the Camp Mohawk Home Education group.  Many of the children there have been home educated for some time and the reason that they are home educated is because their parents knew about home education and believe it to be a better alternative to schooling. Each has their own way of putting their home education into practice, but generally they make those choices consciously.

Where we live, on the edge of Greater London, a large number of the teenagers and children out of school are being home educated because they have experienced problems at school.  Sometimes this means that they were badly bullied, on other occasions that they were disruptive or violent in school and have been expelled.   Often the parents are unwilling home educators, who don’t believe in their own ability to educate their children satisfactorily.

I always say that I have a foot in both camps, really.  I did remove my children from school because they were unhappy, but I have come to believe that home education is a far better - and less damaging - way of educating children.

Often parents who are home educating due to necessity, rely on advice from local authorities or teachers who have no actual experience of home education at all.  In my dealing with my local authority I have been astonished at how little curiosity or even interest they have in the ways in which home-based education, particularly autonomous education, differs from school-based education.  They simply expect it to be the same, and expect that their knowledge and experience of schooling will be applicable to home education too.

Even if you decide to run a school at home set up, however, there are significant ways in which home based education may differ from school.  The most significant difference is that there is a lot less pressure for a child to be literate early in the home.  At school, where many of the activities are explained in work sheets or work books, there is a huge pressure on children to be literate as early as possible.  Some researchers have linked the increase in dyslexia and dyspraxia with this emphasis on early literacy, and certainly the amount of time that a child spends naturally running around, balancing, swinging, all the things which are suggested as ways of helping dyspraxic children, is naturally cut down if you have children sitting down trying to learn how to read.

If you are home educating, and available to your children, then most of the things which are done in school by reading can be done by talking.  Although local authority inspectors seem to have a superstition that children haven’t learned something unless they have written it down, this isn’t true.  People are perfectly capable of learning many things without writing any of them down.

At home, parents can put things into context for their children.  If they ask a question, in answering you will naturally draw upon what you know of their interests and experiences and help to make sense of whatever it is.  You don’t need to think about it, this is something which parents do naturally.  Teachers do too, but their knowledge of their pupils is limited by the number that they are trying to teach at one time.

In common with many people setting out to home educate, I initially had a plan and a timetable and intended to run a school at home.  I think probably that was helpful to the older two, as they had been in school, and it made a good transition from school to home.  But pretty rapidly I learned to trust that my children were learning and exploring and curious about the world, and we moved gradually from planned to unplanned, didactic to autonomous.

I fear that many of the people who are forced to home educate due to circumstances, don’t come into contact with ideas about autonomous education, which offers a whole new model of how people learn and why.  They are used to teacher-centred education, and believe that this is the model to aspire to.  In the case of parents who were not academic themselves at school, this puts a huge amount of pressure onto them to be the teacher, to learn the things that they want to teach to their children and to pass them on, just as in school.

It makes me sad that there is so little writing about the alternative, in which the parent is not the teacher, but the facilitator, and where the family can explore together, gaining more information and learning more where necessary.  I have found this to be a joyful experience, where we spark questions and then work to find answers together.  It’s a creative and inspiring process which has far more benefits than the alternative, where the parent seeks to learn the information and then to transmit it to children.

In the course of my first couple of years as a home educator, I began to realise how much I had been indocrinated in the course of my education, with the way in which things are normally done.  Splitting the world into subjects is something which may make sense in school, but in the home you begin to see the world in a much more integrated way, and realise that there is no way of separating maths and English and science from cookery.  You begin to see that explaning liquid measures with diagrams and numbers is so much less easy than doing it with jugs and bottles and jars.

Much of the difference in the autonomous approach, is that you trust the children to ask their own questions, and to find their own answers.  It can be a little unnerving if one of your children isn’t curious about reading for years (one of mine didn’t read well until 11) or if their curiosity centres around computer games and fast food… but once you understand the ways in which learning from firsthand experience differs from learning by being lectured, it is impossible to go back, I feel.

It is my vision, that as 3D worlds like Second Life expand, one could have a place where anyone can learn about anything, with no entry requirements, no exams to pass, no restrictions on the learning that one can do.  How mad is that, anyway?  We live in a culture that puts up barriers to progress in learning.  In order to be thought fit to learn one subject, you may have to jump through innumerable hoops in other subjects.  In my educational utopia, every school is like the teen challenge experience I have just participated in… children with freedom to attend a group session or do their own thing, hanging out with other teenagers, or finding something they want to do… with equipment and resources available when needed.

That’s a vision for the future, but meanwhile in the UK, it can be the reality for home educated children, if only parents know it is an option and that it works.

My children are home educated, and usually spend one day a week at Camp Mohawk, in the wilds of Berkshire, just
outside Wargrave.  We’ve been coming to Camp Mohawk with varying degrees of regularity for about four years I think. 

We drive off down the A40 to the ancient A4 which runs between Maidenhead and Reading, turning off through Wargrave to
the twisty single-lane roads where one has to pull into a verge or (if you’re not careful) a ditch to let other vehicles pass by, amidst fields of crops contained by neat hedges and the odd fence.  Eventually one reaches Crazies Hill and a dirt track laced with flinty gravel leads up the hill past a working farmyard which doubles as a business centre, to the woods and Camp Mohawk.

It is a beautiful place.  Surrounded by deciduous trees which dwarf the wooden buildings, there are primroses and bluebells in the woods at the moment, some trees are shrouded in a light spring veil of leaves, and others are still quite bare except for some sticky buds.  A small wild rabbit hops out from a woodpile to graze on the new grass and skitters away again when I approach.  Above the camp if you carry on up the hill, is an ancient clearing encircled by beech trees, where your footsteps crackle with the ancient layers of discarded beech nut cases underfoot.  Here is it possible to believe that you have been transported back to pre-Roman times, often the only sounds being the occasional crack from the trees, and the echoing  voices of children, or the cry of the red kites wheeling overhead. 

Camp Mohawk was originally organised in a barely believable way…. It was intended as a holiday place for autistic children, run by the scouts, and townie scouts from the East end of London came to the camp and looked after autistic children, some of them pretty young, doing all the work, cooking, cleaning, required.  Some of the autistic children who still attend camp as teenagers, visited the camp when it was run by scouts. 

Unfortunately,the leader and founder of the Camp was prosecuted and jailed for child abuse, which must have been very distressing for both the volunteers and families attending the camp.  It seems pretty amazing in these days, when even adults are not supposed to go into the kitchen unless they have a hygiene certificate, that unqualified scouts from Beckton might be put in total charge of autistic children, some of them little more than babies. 

For a while it looked bleak for the centre, but fortunately Ian Cotton, who had been working as a volunteer at the centre for a year while doing research for a book about it, believed that there was something about Camp Mohawk that worked magic for autistic children.  He believed in the place so much that he agreed to take over as director in order to keep it open.

Ian was Director of the centre when we first started going there.  The centre was used by autistic children and their families in the evenings after school and at weekends, but it was empty during the week during the day (outside the holidays), and so a home education group had started to use it both in the summer and in the winter.  My children loved it.  It provided real freedom, a place where they could take off into the woods and build shelters or play games. 

During the summer, usually the parents sit in the sunshine on the outdoor chairs and tables which are scattered over the grassy area, close to the buildings, a cluster of low level wooden huts which make up the administrative heart of the centre, and the children have the run of the woods, and the football field, and adventure playground, overlooking the Berkshire countryside all around, as far as the eye can see.

The freedom that the place offers for children is quite unusual in these days, even for home educated children.  The dangers of the roads and the huge increase in the number of cars on our crowded island mean that younger children simply can’t be allowed to roam the streets, even if parents aren’t worried about the dangers of abduction etc.  Camp Mohawk offers a safe place where children can be free to go off on their own and enough space to make them feel that freedom.

The home education group has gradually expanded its use of the centre to encompass classes over the winter months, when Camp Mohawk as a centre for children on the autistic spectrum is usually closed. They also use it during the months from Easter to September, when it has traditionally been open.  Twice a year, at Easter and in the October half-term, the home education group open the doors to the other groups who use the centre and some strangers too, and run Teen Challenge.  This consists of four days running around the woods, playing football, chatting, hanging out around the centre, with some organised sessions of activities, and drop-in arts activities too. 

Last week, there was a base of home educated children, a group of Crossroads teenagers who come to every teen challenge, some of the autistic teenagers who attend camp normally and a smattering of schoolchildren who usually are related to or friendly with children in the other groups.  They were able to choose to participate in group activities like shelter building and survival skills, football training, rock climbing, orienteering and laser quest, or to hang out around camp, listening to music, talking, playing basketball or playing computer games. 

While there wasn’t a lot of crossover between groups - the teenagers mostly stayed in the groups of friends they knew best - the groups came together for some of the more popular activities, and collaborated together in a very natural way.  I was dreading the weather - we had heavy snowfall on Sunday at home, and more sleet and snow predicted, but we were very lucky - it was mostly cold but sunny.

I spent a lot of time running drop-in art activities in the art room, and had cunningly brought a heater from home to keep me warm.  On the first day, which was bitterly cold, it provided refuge for those who were too cold to continue outside… groups came and decorated boxes, made hangings for a peace tree, and started bracelets.

It’s hard to explain how wonderful it is to see such a diverse group of teenagers in one place.  In general we have always found Camp Mohawk to be a tolerant and accepting place, but this is a poor way to describe how very positive it is, how free and how welcoming. The freedom to participate or to watch, to choose to do what everyone else was doing, or to find something other, is something that traditional approaches barely allow for autistic children, and they might be expected to dislike it.  They don’t appear to however, and there was barely a ripple of discontent over the course of the four days from anyone.

The Camp has a core of staff and volunteers, who are around and about for those who need them.  One of the volunteers,
Huxley, came and showed a couple of reluctant boys how to convert a washing line peg into a useful clip for the fridge.  After a few words of encouragement they enthusiastically converted one into a penguin and the other into a savage wolf.

The final day included laser quest among the woods, a fancy dress competition and disco, with an open fire offering an
alternative for those who like to retain some useful hearing.  My children all agreed that the final day was "awesome" and all of them enjoyed it.

The centre is always short of money and welcomes donations, which can be sent care of Luke Janssen at Camp Mohawk,
Crazies Hill, Wargrave, Berkshire, RG10 8PU

 I think it would be true to say that none of my family and few of my friends understand why I love Second Life in the way that I do.  I find that most of them think that I live in a fantasy world, and others think that it is a game that I play.   I find that online experience is rather like religious faith… unless you get it for yourself, you just don’t get it. 

One of the big benefits that Second Life has given me, as a home educator, is the chance to meet and socialise with people I would never had had the opportunity to meet in real life.  All the people I meet have come into Second Life for reasons of their own, and the reasons are as varied as the people.  I know people who are housebound due to an illness or disability, who are able to meet others through the medium of Second Life.  They can choose to make their physical problems a problem in Second Life too (some avatars have wheelchairs) or they can free themselves in the virtual world and spend their time dancing, or in some other "physical" activity like skating or cycling.

Some people with autistic spectrum disorders have found Second Life has tranformed their view of the world.  They are able to cope with interaction with people in a virtual world, where you can control how much information or how much of a scene you are seeing, and for some the ability to talk to other people on an even footing has been a revelation.

People with physical traits which prejudice others against them can find socialising in a virtual world very liberating.  For everyone, there is the chance to make your avatar a lot younger, or a lot older than your real life self, to experiment with your appearance, to play with it.  Some people have found that being able to be a woman or a man in Second Life when their actual gender is different has been a very positive thing for them.  Other people find that being able to adopt a non-human, animal or fantasy character avatar is more in keeping with how they want to be.

The interesting thing about Second Life is that everyone you see has chosen to appear the way that you see them.  It has to be admitted that there are some prejudices in the virtual world too… some people seem to have a prejudice against anyone who hasn’t changed their appearance at all, others disllike avatars which have a lot of sparkly bling type jewellery, or a lot of fancy particle effects, others dislike particular subcultures like furries.

I have found people to be surprisingly generous, open and kind in Second Life.  It has impressed me that people are accessible and open to others, no matter what their status or profession in real life.  Currently that offers a wonderful variety of experiences in getting to know people.  Those who haven’t visited virtual worlds often seem to have the impression that "knowing" someone in Second Life is somehow an artificial or unreal experience.  It’s something which causes some psychological confusion when you first enter the world, because you are lacking many of the triggers and clues that you rely on in real life, like body language, accents, emotional expression in the voice etc.

One of my friends in Second Life, who is a lecturer at University, has a theory that Second Life is the same as real life, we just think it’s different.  He points out that we have no real way of knowing how people are in real life, we just think we do. The assumptions we make about other people due to their body language, appearance and accent are just as likely to be wrong as they are to be right. 

Interestingly, many academics and professionals in Second Life seem to be working towards ways of ensuring that people can look exactly as they do in real life, adding voice capabilities, allowing people to become ever more realistic in their avatars by basing them on real life photographs, linking the environment to the real life environment.  Most people I meet don’t see that as a positive thing, they think that more and more realism will detract from the world.

In many ways, talking to and getting to know someone in Second Life can be a purer experience than in real life, because it is an interaction which is separate from their roles in real life, their position or job, their appearance and their accent or even nationality.  Talking to someone in Second Life, you are dependent upon what someone says about themselves.  Of course, just as in real life, people are not always what they seem… but that is really a given in SL… when you can be a vampyre or a tiger, a robot or a lithe 25 year old, it is understood that you may not be — or in all likelihood aren’t — what you seem.

For adults, Second Life offers a safe place to meet people, where you aren’t in any physical danger, and can explore things which you might not feel free to in real life.  You can take risks, meet people and introduce yourself to strangers, you can find friends or spend your time in solitary pursuits.  In Second Life there is not reason to do anything because someone has told you to or you feel you ought:  you have choices, always.  You need only have as your friends the people you feel you have something in common with, you need only do those things you want to do.  You can’t be forced to do anything at all.

I have found the virtual world very liberating and very inspiring.  I have made friends from all over the world, and I have learned a great deal from them.  I have learned an enormous amount about myself too, in the time I have spent there.  It is a place where you can play with ideas of identity and experiement with it, but most people find pretty quickly that they value truth and honesty in other people, and that this has an impact on how they appear.  I don’t mean that everyone immediately starts to try to recreate their real life appearance in Second Life:  I am talking about truths which come from inside.  This may mean that a transgendered person will feel happier and more honest in an opposite-sex avatar, whereas someone who didn’t mind what sort of avatar he arrived in, and made a busty blonde female avatar, pretty soon wishes to change back to a male one.

For many people with small children, and for many home educators, social life revolves around our children, and so contact and conversation with other adults is at a premium, and Second Life can provide contact with others that is missing from real life.  More than that, it would be possible to set up groups which can allow home educators to collaborate and consult each other, building projects, discussing subjects of interest, building up information and resources for others.  The possibilities for co-operation and collaboration are endless.

The most exciting aspect of the grid, is that you can search for the way of being in Second Life that suits you personally, and then discover that you have been making those choices, unconsciously in real life, you just haven’t been aware that they were choices.  For me, Second Life has raised my awareness in ways that are unexpected.  I think it has the potential to do that for everyone.  I am hoping that someday soon, one of my friends and family will try it and find that out for themelves.

I have been asked by a commenter on my post on virtual worlds and education to explain something about Second Life and its uses for education.  Second Life is a virtual world that I have spent a lot of time in over the past four years.  Although some people talk about "playing" the "game", most residents in Second Life do not regard it as a game, but a platform.  Second Life is a series of areas of virtual land which reside on the servers of Linden Labs, the company which owns Second Life.  When I first entered Second Life in 2004 there were 105 sims as these areas of land are known.  A "sim" is a square of the map on the mainland or a stand alone island away from the mainland, which measures 256 metres by 256 metres. There are now over 14,000 sims.

The land itself is like real life, grass, rocks, sea, sand.  Someone who owns a sim can change the textures on the land to make an all-sand desert sim, an all-grass rural sim, or a mixture of textures to try to make a realistic island with beaches and rock on higher ground.  Land of all sizes and types is bought and sold all the time in Second Life.  To buy a whole sim costs $1695 US new from Linden Labs, plus a $295 monthly tier charge. 

More or less everything in Second Life is made from primitives, which are basic building blocks.  Each piece of land has a prim allowance to go with it, which is the number of prims which can be used on that parcel of land.  A small 512 square meter plot of land can use 117 prims in total.  A whole sim allows you to use 15,000 prims.  Basically, the monthly tier fee is buying you storage on the servers, and the administration of the grid.

You are represented by an avatar in world.  Avatar is a word which is becoming familiar as many of the message boards and messenger services now allow you to choose an avatar.  In SL terms it is a figure which can be human, or can be made to look like an animal or a robot or virtually anything else.  Currently the basic avatar design is based on a human form, which means that being four legged can be a bit complicated, but it can be done.

An initial basic account for Second Life is free, and one can dowload the program from Secondlife.com and then register for the free account.  It does require a pretty high end machine, with a good graphics card, and broadband internet connection.  There are some commercial companies, like Ben and Jerry’s, which offer free accounts through a portal on their website, although you may have to hunt around a little for the links.  Joining through a commercial portal usually means that you will be directed through to that company’s land in Second Life, where there is usually orientation material to help you get started.  If you join through the Linden portal, there is an orientation island and a help island where you can get to grips with the possibilities in world. There are also a lot of volunteer mentors who can offer help and advice with the first steps.

Every avatar has the capability to build things in Second Life.  It is necessary to go to a place where you are allowed to build, either public sandboaxes or land which you own or have the rights to build on.  There are lessons in world in various places to help you learn to build, and classes are often run to help people to make their first steps in building.  There are now many guides and how to articles on the web.

Every avatar has the capability to script in Second Life.  Scripts are currently written in Linden Scripting Language (LSL) and add functions to the object that you make.  For example, a door isn’t much use as a door without a door script in it, which will make the door open either on the approach of an avatar, or when clicked.  There are classes in LSL in world, and a lot of guides and a scripting wiki too. 

Initially, just learning how to move in world, how to teleport, use the in world search function, deal with the jargon and the user interface, and exploring will take up a lot of time.  People often spend a lot more time in world than they ought to do in the first few weeks, more than is healthy or compatible with a job or family responsibilities.  I have frequently met people in my work as a mentor who have spent 24 hours or more online in their first few days in Second Life, because there is so much to do and to see.

Where people take Second Life from there very much depends on their interests.  I found myself intrigued by building, and have spent a large part of my time in Second Life doing that.  Other people get hooked on scripting, or on making textures, or making sounds to use in world. Some people spend a lot of money on buying clothes, furniture or buildings for their avatars.  Some people who have a talent they can exploit, make a reasonable income in Second Life, making virtual furniture, clothing, animations or sounds.

There is so much more than this though.  There is the chance to meet people you’d never have met in real life.  Sometimes this is serendipitous:  you happen to introduce yourself to someone at an event and strike up a conversation.  Sometimes you will find a lecture or presentation on a subject of interest to you and find that the world’s expert in that subject is attending or is presenting at the event.  More and more events in the real world are presented in the virtual world too - sometimes there is even interaction between them, and you are able to show what’s happening in the Second Life event in the real world, and what is happening in the real life event in Second Life.  You can stream quicktime media into Sl, and so it is possible for avatars to watch films together, or use powerpoint presentations, or machinima, films made in Second Life.

Currently, you can only have around 50 people on a single sim for an event, or up to 200 for an event which takes place on a four-sim convergence.  Although commercial companies complain about this, i think it is one of the best aspects of SL:  it is possible to meet and get to know all the people at an event or meeting, rather than it reflecting real life, where you would be lucky to meet more than one or two people. The limit is due to the fact that unlike many games and other online places, everything in the world has to be streamed to your computer, including the appearance and movements of the other avatars in a location.  This will change as the technology develops, but I hope it doesn’t develop too fast, really.

What are the uses of Second Life for education?  First of all, for home educators, it is a brilliant way to keep in touch with other people, to collaborate on projects and to exchange experience.  One of the positive aspects of SL is the feeling it gives you, when you meet with people, of being in the same place at the same time as the others.  Where webcam and video conferencing can sometimes emphasise the fact that you are in different places, and come between people, Second Life seems to have the opposite effect, making people feel that they are sharing an experience in the same place in space and time.  That can be important for all sorts of reasons.

One could run virtual conferences, virtual meetings, virtual seminars.  One can invite guests to come and talk, as in real life, but the audience could all be in different countries, or different continents, though in the same place virtually.

Secondly, it is possible to build more or less anything you can imagine in Second Life.  I have a friend in SL who is an archaelogist.  He’s  built a Roman sim, complete with a huge amount of information and goods in Second Life.  It would be possible to make a sim for any period in history, with authentic buildings, artefacts, clothing, town or village organisation, appropriate goods and chattels etc.  More than that, one could use scripting to construct a game in the sim which would require information to be obtained in order to progress the game.  I have built a game (for entertainment purposes only) in Numbakulla sim, but it would be possible to provide a world which is interesting and absorbing to explore, and include a game which would be entertaining and instructive.  I can think of several TV programmes in the last twenty years provided for children, which have included gathering information in order to fulfil a quest, and that sort of thing would be very easy to translate to Second Life.

There is a huge potential for collaboration in Second Life.  For example, there must be home educators with particular knowledge or interests around particular periods in history, where parents and interested children could collaborate on making a sim project for others to visit.  Conversely there may be parents with a high level of knowledge in a certain subject - physics, say - who might be able to provide learning materials on a physics sim for children who are interested but don’t have access to an adult interested in that subject.

Though we may resist it, it seems to me that there is enormous value and potential in collaborations with Universities, Colleges and schools around the world.  Imagine being able to find someone with specialist knowledge in virtually any subject, or being able to make contact with people in Japan… or Australia… or anywhere with a broadband connection.

The major problem for home educators is that currently the teen grid for young people aged 13-17, is separate from the adult grid for people 18 plus.  If you buy one or more sims, it is possible to fence those off from both grids, to have your own standalone grid, and that’s what I would love to be doing.  I’d prefer not to have sims fenced off from anyone, but the amount of adult material in Second Life, and the ban on adults in the teen grid means that a fenced off area is the only way of ensuring that home educated children and parents could be in the same place at the same time.

Second Life is a very flexible platform, which can make amazing things happen.  CMP media is a company that runs real life conferences and has started to run conferences in Second Life, and reported that people who attended their first conference in Second Life last spring spent an average of 29-30 hours at the conference in the course of a week - a figure which is higher than that achieved with Webinars, Videos, or real life conferences.  Not only that, but people formed real friendships and collaborations as the result of meeting at the event, again something that doesn’t need to stop when the conference is over.

More than anything else, what I see as the advantage of Second Life and the other developing virtual worlds is the element of choice which it provides about what to learn and when.  It is an unschoolers or autonomous educators dream.  Currently adults can choose whether to spend their time learning about the platform, getting to grips with design, virtual architecture, scripting, or programming.  They can choose to explore and may be able to study languages, find out historical information, or simply meet people from a different culture.  They can choose to seek out formal classes and information, and join groups to obtain more details or information.  It is rapidly becoming something approaching the 3D web… a place to explore and discover more about any subject you choose, including yourself. 

by Daniel Quinn

I suspect that not everyone in this audience knows who I am or why I’ve been invited to speak to you to day. After all, I’ve never written a book or even an article about home schooling or unschooling. I’ve been called a number of things: a futurist, a planetary philosopher, an anthropologist from Mars. Recently I was introduced to an audience as a cultural critic, and I think this probably says it best. As you’ll see, in my talk to you today, I will be trying to place schooling and unschooling in the larger context of our cultural history and that of our species as well.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my work, I should begin by explaining what I mean by "our culture." Rather than burden you with a definition, I’ll give you a simple test that you can use wherever you go in the world. If the food in that part of the world is under lock and key, and the people who live there have to work to get it, then you’re among people of our culture. If you happen to be in a jungle in the interior of Brazil or New Guinea, however, you’ll find that the food is not under lock and key. It’s simply out there for the taking, and anyone who wants some can just go and get it. The people who live in these areas, often called aboriginals, stone-age peoples, or tribal peoples clearly belong to a culture radically different from our own.

first began to focus my attention on the peculiarities of our own culture in the early 1960s, when I went to work for what was then a cutting-edge publisher of educational materials, Science Research Associates. I was in my mid-twenties and as thoroughly acculturated as any senator, bus-driver, movie star, or medical doctor. My fundamental acceptances about the universe and humanity’s place in it were rock-solid and thoroughly conventional.

But it was a stressful time to be alive, in some ways even more stressful than the present. Many people nowadays realize that human life may well be in jeopardy, but this jeopardy exists in some vaguely defined future, twenty or fifty or a hundred years hence. But in those coldest days of the Cold War everyone lived with the realization that a nuclear holocaust could occur literally at any second, without warning. It was very realistically the touch of a button away.

Human life would not be entirely snuffed out in a holocaust of this kind. In a way, it would be even worse than that. In a matter of hours, we would be thrown back not just to the Stone Age but to a level of almost total helplessness. In the Stone Age, after all, people lived perfectly well without supermarkets, shopping malls, hardware stores, and all the elaborate systems that keep these places stocked with the things we need. Within hours our cities would disintegrate into chaos and anarchy, and the necessities of life would vanish from store shelves, never to be replaced. Within days famine would be widespread.

The complete article…

Exposing the Fraud of ADD and ADHD Articles, essays, and other information pertaining to the fraud of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)–Compiled by Dr. Fred Baughman Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD has been an adult & child neurologist, in private practice, for 35 years. Making "disease" (real diseases–epilepsy, brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, etc.) or "no disease" (emotional, psychological, psychiatric) diagnoses daily, he has discovered and described real, bona fide diseases. http://www.adhdfraud.org/

Take Cheshire County Council by way of an example. Cheshire CC has issued a press release which comes with the tagline:

"Cheshire Calls For Tougher Guidelines Concerning Home Education"

Stop. Go no further than that just now, for there’s already a problem. The thing is, guidelines do have to respect the law and if you go any tougher than the current draft guidelines, the law will have to be changed to reflect this.

OK, that’s the first howler, (more on which below). The second one is that members of Cheshire County Council clearly haven’t asked themselves whether they really do want such changes in law, for if they had, they wouldn’t be asking for tougher guidelines. Doh dum.

They blunder on:

More of this article by Carlotta