You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. — Erma Bombeck

It’s the bold, not the meek, who vault higher during hard times. Fear leads nowhere; enthusiasm can lead everywhere.

People who bind themselves to what they love tend to succeed in some way, shape, or form. — Jacquelyn Mitchard, Why Passion Matters

Thank you, Ellen, for sending the link to this wonderful article!

Kelly’s comment on The Only Thing That Matters:

This echoes something I heard recently … that most parents in this time period want their kids to have as many experiences as possible. In return, children are end up experience rich and relationally poor. The point was not that we should keep our kids from having wonderful experiences. Simply that we should be encouraging them in quality relationships.

Why are kids’ schedules so packed with organized activities and experiences? There have been numerous articles in the media every year for the last decade, at least, about “overscheduled kids,” but I don’t notice any real interest in a return to the lazy childhood days of yore.

In fact, not only do we still pack our kids’ week full of sports, clubs, camps, classes, and etc., but even during family outings, we itch to organize the kids’ experiences.

In our family, we respect that “nothing time” of childhood — time spent dreaming and playing and thinking and discovering. We see the value in empty, unscheduled time, and we prioritize giving it to our children. In fact, we prioritize giving it to ourselves. We feel that it feeds our souls and makes our work and our relationships better.

What do you think?

Parents worry about kids’ boredom, so they schedule their lives to keep them busy. But empty hours teach children how to create their own happiness. — Alvin Rosenfeld, The Over-scheduled Child

The pressure to excel is undermining childhood as never before. Why are we so keen to mold [children] into successful adults, instead of treasuring their genuineness and carefree innocence? — Johann Christoph Arnold

Children need adults in their lives who understand the relationship between boredom and creativity — and are willing to set the stage so that kids can create the play. — Richard Louv

[T]here’s more than stress involved in pushing children onto the fast track to success before they even understand the concept. For one thing, children aren’t allowed to discover motivation on their own — and motivation is often more important to success than talent. Pushed children never have the opportunity to discover who they are. And they never learn to be at ease with themselves when alone, with time on their hands. Having experienced life “by the clock” — and almost constantly surrounded by others — these kids have never learned the joy of solitude, of having only oneself for company. Not only does this mean they’re unable to practice self-reflection, but they’re also unable to simply be. — Rae Pica

Home at last and now it was the time she had been looking forward to all week: fire-escape-sitting time. She put a small rug on the fire-escape and got the pillow from her bed and propped it against the bars Luckily there was ice in the icebox. She chipped off a small piece and put it in a glass of water. The pink-and-white peppermint wafers bought that morning were arranged in a little bowl, cracked, but of a pretty blue color. She arranged glass, bowl and book on the window sill and climbed out on the fire-escape. Once out there, she was living in a tree. No one upstairs, downstairs or across the way could see her. But she could look out through the leaves and see everything.

It was a sunny afternoon. A lazy warm wind carried a warm sea smell. The leaves of the tree made fugitive patterns on the white pillowcase. Nobody was in the yard and that was nice. …

Francie breathed the warm air, watched the dancing leaf shadows, ate the candy and took sips of the cooled water in-between reading the book. — A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Face it: The arts still don’t fit in most of our schools and none of the advocacy claims made for them have helped a whit in the last five decades. The arts community — arts educators, arts organizations, artists who work with schools, other friends of the arts — has tried and failed for years to make the case for the arts in every student’s life and learning environment.

… All the arts for all the children - hah! It's still some if any of the arts in scattered pockets of excellence, for some of the children, some of the time, taught by a combination of people who can rarely work together as a team and who prize different means, methods, ends and purposes.

… Less advocacy, more action, locally. That’s probably the best place to start. — Jane Remer, The Arts Just Don’t Fit in Most of Our Schools

Most processes and practices of school leadership, our study shows, create temporary, localized flurries of change but little lasting or widespread improvement. — A. Hargreaves and D. Fink, The Seven Principles of Sustainable Leadership

People also talked to me with great enthusiasm about innovative programs. But these were always paid for with federal money, and as time went on, it always turned out that when the federal money stopped, so did the program. People might feel badly about losing these wonderful programs. But pay for them with local money, their own money? It was never considered. — John Holt, Teach Your Own

Only slowly did I realize that the people who brought me in to speak were almost always a tiny minority in their own school or community, and that my task was to say out loud in public what people were sick of hearing them say, or even what they had been afraid to say at all. — John Holt, Teach Your Own

• • •

Less advocacy. More action. I believe this.

When I started my school, I had no funding, no partners, no community, no support. I slowly, slowly built a community, found students, found like-minded teachers and parents. There was still no funding.

The school had to be remade constantly, like a sand castle on the beach, erased over and over again by students graduating, teachers leaving, families moving away.

Homeschooling is, as John Holt suggested, infinitely easier and more fun than making a school. Yet … a school serves more than one family. It serves a community. It creates community. It has the capacity to advocate for large numbers of children and educate all the members of their extended family. It is a big project well worth doing.

If we wait … for educational policy to change, for society to change, for cultural values to change … we will be waiting a long, long time. Children grow up very fast, and policy changes very, very slowly. If we merely advocate for children to have more art and less homework, more time collaborating and less time cramming for standardized tests — if we merely advocate, then we are working for some other parents’ children. In order to make things different for our children, now, we have to act. We have to act decisively and quickly, before their childhoods fall through our fingers like sand and one day we simply stop thinking about these things and start thinking about how to pay for college instead. And some other parent takes up the gauntlet we let drop, and the process begins again.

And this isn’t just about schools. It’s about the lives of children everywhere, all the time. The pervasive negative attitudes about children’s behavior and what they can accomplish without adult management.

Instead of wishing for things to be different, we have to make them different, today. Be the change we wish to see in the world, as Ghandi said. Less talk, more walk.

The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. —E. L. Doctorow

Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it. — James Baldwin

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett