Excellent piece on the importance of play, with great quotes at the end.

The unschooling blog carnival is hosted this month by Silvia of Po Moyemu. Good stuff there!

A new Signing Time DVD! A NEW SIGNING TIME DVD!!!!!

Wow. I want to take a class with this guy. Or better yet, just have him come over and walk through town with us. Dr. Stilgoe, you have a standing invitation, hear?

"Harvard, he says, has some of the finest students in the world, but he believes most of them are visual illiterates. Their academic lives have been programmed around verbal and mathematical tests that will get them into a good college, but he says they lack a sense of spontaneity.
“I think they’ve missed a kind of self-guided, non-organized activity, non-sports activity growing up. Wandering around, getting into things. And the assumption seems to be nowadays is if a child isn’t in an organized activity, the child is a criminal,” says Stilgoe. “But as far as I can understand, most of my colleagues I work with seem to have found their careers by being slightly disorganized. Lucking into something, you know.”
(tags: unschooling seeing learning)