This has been my philosophy of education for over 40 years. It’s what got me fired from New College of California, after only one year there, in 1973. Like Socrates, I was corrupting the youth, being “too experimental” for even that experimental college. (A noble experiment, New College finally folded in 2008, due to catch-22 accreditation problems.)

Ever since then, I’ve been living on culture’s edge, where, as we permaculturists say, all the action is. Where man-made boundaries dissolve into the vastness.

Here’s some hopeful news, re: education. First, a front page, surprisingly (to me) respectful, three-part series on homeschooling by the local Herald-Times.

Part I: Home is Where the Classroom Is

Part II: Some Homeschool Parents Follow Guidelines

(And, as it says in the article, some don’t.)

Part III comes out tomorrow. I will be interested to see how the paper evaluates homeschooling. If the title to Part II is any indication, there’s a subtle bias towards standardization.

But, not all educational thinking is rigidly “common-core”. For example:

How to draw out curiosity in children through embracing uncertainty

And what is more “uncertain” than the history of our successive, wrong, “scientific” beliefs that pretend to fully understand nature?

Meanwhile, this, from theguardian:

We need fewer exams and more wilderness in education

Isn’t it obvious? Once we see through the mind-map our educational and social conditioning restricted us to, there are spaces between the lines everywhere. Everywhere! Nature fills the spaces with endless wonder and mystery. No map can possibly “capture” even a miniscule drop of the wild, just as no map can possibly capture the capacities and sheer unbridled excitement — of the human being, once unleashed to follow his or her own nature.

P.S. Check out the Baby Picture Project, for a new initiative that aims to jump start the process of ripping off mask after mask to reveal our original selves.