Parents ‘n Schools

News item:  Paul Newman dies aged 83.
Butch and Sundance, of course, can never be forgotten (“You keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you do best.”).
And his voice will live on in my children’s “Cars” video games.
And I’m sorry we never got to see him and Redford together again in “A Walk In The Woods” (the author, […]

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At the invitation of a friend I had the pleasure of attending a one-day conference last week on “sales”. About 900 people. 5 speakers. All of whom were excellent. But for me the star of the show was the headliner, Jeffrey Gitomer. The kind of entertaining, insightful and provocative speaker you could listen to all […]

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Stop me if I’ve already told this story, but I once took a stab at politics. What I call my “political summer camp” experience.
It was the middle of summer a few years back. A provincial election was in the wind. Our local MLA announced she was resigning after serving the better part of two decades. […]

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The first line of the first page of the Introduction to Professor Stamp’s most excellent book (About Schools — What Every Canadian Parent Should Know) begins:
The Canadian Education Association chose for its Year 1951 Education Week the theme “Education is Everyone’s Business.” The slogan seemed to capture the idea that parents, community members and the […]

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Gentle Parent, after some 120 entries over six months writing about whatever crossed my clearly confused mind, I have an admission to make.
I’ve been holding out on you.
Throughout that time, and for some time before, I have been in possession of the single best resource I have ever found on parents ‘n schools… and I […]

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The challenge of addressing the “pi / pie” thing for parents, and training parents generally in the subtle arts and precise elements of modern schooling, is enormous when considered from the perspective of training them the way children are taught (or schoolers train themselves). The challenges of physical delivery of “PD for Parents”, both in […]

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In a gift shop somewhere on vacation this summer a little magnetized cartoon caught my eye and I brought it home and added it to a collection that clings to the fridge.
It is a single cartoon scene from The Simpsons, and it shows Homer listening attentively (fingers intertwined) to Lisa at the kitchen table, apparently […]

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Government schooling holds very tightly to the requirement of “certification” for schoolers.
You really can’t be one without it.
How hard would it be to develop and operate a “certification” program for parents, too?
When you register a child in Kindergarten, you are effectively signing yourself up for a 13 year “career” as a co-educator of your children […]

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K-12 government schooling in Alberta is a $6 billion per year business.
It’s a $60 billion per year business across Canada, and a $600+ billion per year business across the United States.
Right now, somewhere between 80% and 90% of that money goes to government schoolers labouring within it. Over half a trillion dollars per year.
I think […]

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Last week Alberta’s Education Minister raised headlines when, in addressing a local Chamber of Commerce gathering, he suggested that one way to help increase high school graduation rates would be if business people would stop hiring anyone without high school diplomas. That got people’s attention.
Including mine, and I wrote the following Letter to the Editor, […]

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