School Survival

California recently made it much easier for teens to seek mental health treatment on their own. In a landmark bill proposed by State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on September 30, SB 543 gives adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 the ability to consent to […]

Reflections on education, colonization, and freedom by Mike Jo Brownlee and Carla Bergman In today's society, school is sometimes spoken about as a necessity for a happy life and as an inherent good. The concept of education is thought to be synonymous with learning, and separates those who are knowledgeable from those who are deficient. […]

by Ellen Galinsky Many people know by now that the United States has fallen to 11th in Newsweek's list of the best countries in the world. What is interesting is that the debate about why we are losing our "oomph as a superpower" has focused in part on U.S. education. As always when we are […]

At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums. Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s […]

Older people prefer to read negative news stories about the young, possibly because it makes them feel better about themselves, a new study suggests. "The more time they spent with negative news about young people, the higher self-esteem they reported. They may get some self-esteem boost out of this," said study author Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, an […]

by Peter Gray (originally published here) According to the most authoritative recent data, approximately 8% of children in the United States, aged 4 to 17, have been diagnosed as having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).[1] The same reports note that the disorder is about three times as frequent in boys as it is in girls, […]

by Peter Gray (originally published here) Many years ago, as part of my early studies of the Sudbury Valley School, I sat in on a school meeting at which the main agenda item had to do with a complaint made about a new student's clothing. A new teenaged enrollee had been coming to school wearing […]

by Alfie Kohn If the subject is kids and how they're raised, it seems our culture has exactly one story to tell. Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines or blogs knows how it goes: Parents today either can't or won't set limits for their children. Instead of disciplining them, they hover and coddle and bend over […]

The Creativity Crisis For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it. Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly […]

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner. But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an […]