School Survival

Police have arrested a Georgia woman who they say forced her son to kill his pet hamster with a hammer as punishment for earning a bad grade. Meriwether County sheriff Steve Whitlock told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday night that the 12-year-old boy told his teacher about the killing. The teacher reported it to the Division […]

by Peter Gray, Ph.D. The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? Children are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Why? Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past fifty […]

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An Ohio youth prison guard was fired and two others were disciplined after a teen offender's attempt to hang himself in a juvenile detention cell was ignored, according to an investigative report obtained by The Associated Press. One guard, who was fired Thursday, saw the youth with a blanket around his neck, […]

New article added to the articles section: Schooling: The hidden agenda. It's a speech Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael) gave at a home-schooling/unschooling conference. For those of you with short attention spans, here are some snippets I found interesting. I've even bolded some parts so if you have very SEVERE attention span issues, you can […]

by Idzie Have you ever heard someone be accused of being "childish", or been accused of that yourself? You probably have, because that's an extremely common insult. It's used when you have political opinions that other people disagree with (anarchy, for instance, is incredibly childish!), it's used when you dare to defy authority and stand […]

Added new article by John Taylor Gatto, called "The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought?" Click here to read it. I personally think it's one of the best articles I've ever read about public schooling.

In early November, NYRA’s project, the Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth were invited to speak at the North Carolina conference of the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA). IECA is a trade organization representing educational consultants, many of whom refer parents (and their teens) to abusive behavior modification programs. These referrals constitute a […]

According to the British National Party website the British National Party will try to achieve the following if they gain power at the 2010 general election: Britain suffers from more than 27,000 crimes per day, or more than ten million crimes per year – the direct result of decades of softly-softly politically correct policing and […]

by Laurie A. Couture With every decade that passes, new legal and civil rights have been fought for and won for every group of adults in Westernized cultures. The fight continues around the globe in order to share those legal protections with oppressed populations in other cultures. With each passing decade, there have been landmark […]

By Amy Silverman Cynthia Clark Harvey climbs the stairs to the second floor of her north Phoenix home, pausing in a small bedroom. It’s the kind of room empty-nesters tend to keep, and this one is packed with artifacts from her daughters’ childhoods. Briana’s Beanie Babies hang on the wall in an organizer with her […]