Thoughts on the Election & Human Progress
My “ministry” is all about celebrating and championing human development at an individual and societal level. A key thread in that development (at both the individual and societal level) is our...
View ArticleTowards the 21 Hour Work Week
Sustainability... it will by all accounts be a key theme of 21st century human society. Sustainable agriculture, energy use, carbon footprint, and average family size are already on the table towards...
View ArticleTwo Education Myths that Stifle Learning
My friend, Lynn Stoddard, a veteran retired educator, is the author of four books and numerous articles on child-centered education reform. I asked him if I could republish his most recent guest...
View ArticleLiving a Self-Directed Life One Week at a Time
Human society is gradually transitioning from hierarchies of domination and control towards egalitarian circles of equals. At least that’s my take on things, and my “life’s work” including this...
View ArticleTraditional Human Wisdom of Child Development
For the first 200,000 years of the human species we were all hunter-gatherers, nomadic tribes of people scattered about the Earth living in sync with the natural ecology of our bountiful planet. It is...
View ArticleReincorporating Hunter-Gatherer Wisdom in our Society
In my previous piece, “Traditional Wisdom of Child Development”, I looked at how contemporary social scientists are rediscovering some of the wisdom of traditional hunter-gatherer societies, which were...
View ArticleFrom Civilization to a Circle of Equals
What follows is an outline of a book I intend to write and get published (even if self-published) in the next few years, based on a lot of the reading, thinking and writing I have done to date. The...
View ArticleWe Need to Move Away from One-Size-Fits-All Education
On Thursday I read an Education Week blog piece, “Survey Finds Rising Job Frustration Among Principals”, highlighting the Metlife Survey of American Teachers documenting declining morale among both...
View ArticleMoving Beyond Civilization's Tools of Control
This is a follow-up on my previous piece, “From Civilization to a Circle of Equals”, where I put forward a view that human civilization, since its flowering 5000 years ago with the invention of...
View ArticleIs the World Ready for a God-Embracing Atheist?
They teach you that when in a job interview if asked whether you have a particular skill or experience and you must honestly say no, it is best to say “no but...” followed by sharing some other skill...
View ArticleFacilitating Many Political Paths with the "Instant Primary"
It seems we Americans are caught up in and even obsessed with dualities. Good and evil, god or no god, democracy or tyranny, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, men are from Mars and...
View ArticleGovernance in the School Trenches
My friend, Peter DeWitt, is a public elementary school principal in upstate New York. He is a thoughtful and caring person, and I think probably represents the best of his public school principal...
View ArticleAbandoning Mars for Venus and Beyond
I was born into a world in the 1950s where gender was a key component of who you were, and was to a large degree your destiny, even growing up in a perhaps more egalitarian and humanistic progressive...
View ArticleTransform Education? Challenge the Governance Model!
I recently read Michele McNeil’s piece in Education Week, “Rifts Deepen Over Direction of Ed. Policy in U.S.”, and was heartened by what I read. The piece begins with this overview...In statehouses...
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A New framework for Working and Learning
For many of us the rules of engagement at work are changing, from the traditional approach of being told what to do by “bosses”, to a new more egalitarian approach where a team of colleagues and peers...
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Unschooling in the Art of Life
As much as formal standardized education tries to turn it into a science, life, and the continuing human development which in my opinion is one of life’s most compelling narratives, is really more of...
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Thoughts on Civilization & Privilege
For nearly 200,000 years our human species (homo sapiens) lived on this bountiful planet in what most anthropologists now believe were mostly small egalitarian bands or tribes of hunter-gatherers,...
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A Democratic Alternative Legacy within Command & Control Public Education
Public education in the U.S. has featured state control of human development since Horace Mann and other educational “reformers” within the New England Protestant elite brought this novel approach of...
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Civilization 2.0 - The Facilitation Edition
For five-thousand years human civilization has been about a small privileged elite mostly directing the activity of the rest of us. The bankruptcy of this approach to human society, if not evident...
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Coop Goes to High School Part 1 - Good Riddance to Junior High
Having written 400 prior diaries for Daily KOS, I decided to take a different direction from my recent pieces exploring human development generally, to go back and focus on a developmental narrative...
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