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While the author, Tom DeWeese, goes a bit overboard in his effort to bash our public education system, he is very thorough. I found this interesting because he rejects the usual view that our schools need smaller class sizes and more money, and he includes the evidence to back up his claims. He offers no real solution, however I think that leaves our minds to think about how we would change education, which is exactly what our paper is about.

This is an interesting article about the study of thought in animals. One hundred years after the gorilla was discovered by Du Chaillu people still didn't recognize intelligence in primates and focused primarily on language acquisition.

That's a tough situation to be in. Intrestingly I stumbled upon this article earlier today, except it was from a evangelical prolife point of view. It's facinating/frusterating to see what the other side thinks.

Alfie Kohn provides an intriguing perspective on the benefits (and lack thereof) of homework. He reveals that there is no strong correlation between excessive amounts of homework and good grades and questions the need for homework at all. Educators tend to not question the premise of homework, but Kohn provides his opinions- backed with evidence- on why they should. It's definitely something to think about.

There is a difference between education and schooling that was brought to my attention by this piece. To go to school and learn is a separate action from receiving an education. Education is a self-initiated action, an endeavor undertaken to better understand the world around you and grow as a person. Trough education t You learn the value of human life and how to think as an individual. Schooling is a task controlled by others, where you are fed others opinions and others ideas and it is for the purpose of others. Gatto argues that the problem with education in America is that we are schooling our children rather than educating them.

This article is very thouugh provoking. I always knew that the arts would help me but this article really opened my eyes to how much the arts will aid me in my life. The arts do way more for you than just making you think more creatively. This article also taught me about how the arts help with handling stress! Very intersting read.

I've always said I wanted cars to be able to drive themselves because I always get so tired when I'm driving... Imagine the time we could save if while we drove we could actually be reading or napping or just enjoying the road instead of focusing on the stress of it. This would create less accidents- but what would happen if the computer crashed.. can we really put our lives in the hand of a machine? Is this showing how dependent on technology we've become; we think we cannot even drive our own cars? What would happen to traffic police?

A brief (11-page) summation of a new way of teaching called Learning in Depth, created by Kieran Egan. The general idea is that in first grade a child will be given a simple, broad topic such as spiders or rocks. Then, that child will study and do projects on that subject for the next 12 years of their school career. It's quite radical, but I think it has a chance of revolutionizing the way we learn. Some of the benefits that they mention are its capacity to build a community of scholars and experts, its emphasis on individual responsibility through independent research, and the fact that it gives the students something to be proud of (their expansive knowledge). I'm especially interested in this idea because I have begun to question the depth of the learning we receive in school and this seems to be at least a STEP in the right direction.

This is a poem written in the 1960's that I thought fit in well with what we were talking about. Shows how long the issue of standardization has been an issue. Makes me think about how school teaches kids that there is always a right and wrong way to do things, when thats not necessarily true.

This just goes to show how badly we need to reform our prisons and how judges sentence people. It also makes me think of David Eagleman's Incognito, because so many of the people who are serving life sentences just got caught up in drugs, prison should be more of a rehabilitation set up.