| 1) AERO Conference Leap Year Registration Deal; Free Gift Offer! Register for the AERO conference by February 29th (the leap year registration price is 33% off the final registration price!) and receive a free copy of The Directory of Democratic Education (a $16 value!). Register and find out more about rates today at http://www.aeroconference.com/registration.htm - All registrants including those who have already registered must submit their deposit by February 29th to guarantee the free gift.
The 5th Annual AERO Conference: "Moving From Ideas to Practice"
This year's AERO conference will take place June 26th - 29th at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY. In addition to our theme, you'll find many new and exciting elements at the conference as well as many of the familiar highlights that make the event what it is. Our keynote speakers this year are Deborah Meier, Matt Hern, Donna Barker, Mary Leue, Molly Nichols & Wesley Clark, and Khalif Williams. Detailed information about the speakers can be found online at:
http://www.aeroconference.com/speakers.htm
Highlights include a beautiful opening ceremony featuring Global Village Photographer Connie Frisbee Houde, International School & Organization Fair & Exhibition featuring dozens and dozens of some of the most interesting and unique alternative schools and organization worldwide (yours can be included!), Low Registration Costs, Free Child Care!, Open Workshop Space (attendee led workshop time), HUGE Bookstore with over 125 titles!, "How to Grow a School" AERO's Start a School 101 3-Part Workshop Series, Morning & Afternoon Tea & Networking Time, Keynote Speaker-Led Workshops, Featured Workshops with Pat Montgomery (founder of Clonlara Home Based Education Program), Chris Mercogliano (author of In Defense of Childhood, Teaching the Restless), Charles Eisenstein (author of The Ascent of Humanity), Randy Gaschler (author of Parent-Driven Schools), Tim Seldin (president of The Montessori Foundation and International Montessori Council), Ron Miller (author What Are Schools For? and Free Schools, Free People) and many more!, Book Signings, Talent Show & Open Mic, Dancing, Lots of Student Participation, and so much more!  2) Bundle of 3 Jan Fortune-Wood Books for 1/3 of the Cost!
For the next 24 hours we are offering a bundle of 3 incredible books on home education and parenting for 66% off just because we can! We are the exclusive North American retailer of these books that otherwise can only be bought in the Great Britain and want to make them available to all!
Doing It Their Way: Home-Based Education and Autonomous Learning
Bound to Be Free: Home Education as a Positive Alternative to Paying the Hidden Costs of 'Free' Education
With Consent: Parenting For All to Win
Each book normally retails for $20.00 plus shipping, but we are selling all 3 for only $19.95 and only charge you for shipping as if it were 1 book!
Find out more and order online at:
http://www.edrev.org/fortunewood.html 3) The Cure for "ADHD"? Here's something a reader sent us from a radio show that aired in 2004, the spear is Thom Hartman:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=315&Itemid=1
... Our quote for the day, William Butler Yeats, "Education is more than the filling of a pail, it is also the lighting of a fire". And along with that, a nice quote from Confucius. "If you plan for a year, plant rice. If your plan is for a hundred years, educate your children."
I remember when one of our children was not doing well in school and he was 12, 13 years old, something like it. First year of middle school as I recall. And the teachers were all freaking out, and all, you know, all, you know how it goes. And it was that ADD thing, right? Put him on medication! And we actually tried that for a short while. Didn't seem to do much good.
And so we decided to go looking for a school for him, a better school, you know, a better educational environment. Let's find a place where he can flourish and there are a bunch of schools in Atlanta in the phone book advertising that they specialize in kids with Attention Deficit Disorder or learning disabilities, and so Louise and I went shopping. And what we found was that most people were of the opinion that because these kids were impulsive and distractible and not particularly well structured and organized, they "needed lots of discipline and structure. Let's just slap it into 'em." The schools that were purporting to be good places for ADHD kids were like variations on military academies.
So we finally had given up on all the ADD specialty schools, and we found this school in downtown Atlanta called the Horizon School which was a leftover remnant of the Summerhill experiment in some ways. Part of the alternative school movement. "Summerhill" was a book by A. S. Neill published back in the 1960s as I recall in which they created a school where the kids ran the school. And this school was actually run by the student council in everything except academics. The teachers had final say in academics but the kids had a student council and they ran the school, and they made all kinds of rules for themselves, it was quite remarkable.
So then I went out and walked around the school and I remember walking into a classroom. This was seventh graders as I recall, seventh or eighth graders. And it looked like absolute chaos. Kids were not sitting at their desk. They were standing up, they were walking around, one kid was sitting on his desk. There was a kid sitting on the teacher's desk. Kids were running up and marking things on the blackboard. The teacher was having a knock down drag out argument with the kids. And I'm standing at the back of the room and you know, keep in mind, a decade earlier, I'd been the executive director of a program for abused kids that had a school! I was the executive director of a program that contained a school. I suppose you could say I was the principal of the school. And I'm standing in the back of the room, you know, with my arms folded across my chest, thinking, "This is a classroom out of control." This would never happen in a school I ran.
And you know how sometimes when you just listen for a few minutes more, all of a sudden you hear something that completely turns your world upside down, that completely changes the way that you view things. And as I stood there, in this very kind of critical, judging posture, I started listening to what the kids and the teacher were arguing about.
What these kids were arguing with this teacher about was that Einstein had suggested in his theory of relativity e=mc2 that you can't exceed the speed of light. That if you exceed the speed of light, you can get to .999% of the speed of light, but if the value of the speed of light becomes one or one point anything, once you hit or exceed the speed of light, then time becomes infinite and mass collapses to zero. Or is it the other way around? Time collapses to zero and mass becomes infinite. I forget which it was. I used to have memorized the time and mass dilation theories but that was when I was a teenager. Anyway, and therefore it's impossible in the physical universe to exceed the speed of light. You can approach it but you can't exceed it. And if that's the case, these kids were saying, then why is it that Einstein in his own theory of relativity, his oh most famous theory, said e (energy) equals mass times the speed of light squared? e=mc2 (c is the speed of light). How can you square something that can't even have as a value of one? How is that possible? How can you square something you can't exceed? They are pulling out Einstein's General and Specific theory of relativity and they're talking about his story about being in the train going away from the clock tower in downtown Austria and as the train approaches the speed of light the hands start to slow down and all this stuff.
And all of a sudden, I got it. That all my life, I had thought that education was about pouring things into kids. Yeats's quote. The filling of a bucket. And that what they understood at that school was that education was about lighting a fire. And so we put our son in that school and not only did he do well, but he was doing work two grade levels above his grade level. He was getting As in senior physics as a freshman or a sophomore. He all of a sudden just caught on fire, he fell in love with learning, and all of this with no drugs, which leads us to the question.
You got a person who has a psychiatric illness in a public school that requires medication from a multibillion-dollar industry, but when you put him into an alternative school environment, not only does he not require the medication, but the disease seems to vanish and he does very well. The question is, then, where is the disease? And I have firmly, solidly come to the conclusion that the disease is in our schools. It's not in our kids.
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