Here are some quotations that I’ve collected over the years about the amazing genius of children. “The real magic wand is the child’s own mind.” – Jose Ortega Y Gasset (Spanish philosopher) “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.” – Mencius (Chinese sage) “No Columbus, no Marco Polo has ever seen stranger and...Read More

There’s a compelling article online at The Atlantic, on David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core State Standards, the “national curriculum” that most of the states in the country will be following in 2014-15.  Coleman has impeccable credentials:  Yale, Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford, a man of letters whose conversation, as the piece states, ”leaps gracefully from Plato to Henry...Read More

The October, 2012 issue of Educational Leadership, the flagship journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), in an issue dedicated to “Students Who Challenge Us,” features my article “First, Discover Their Strengths,” which highlights many of the ideas discussed in my forthcoming book Neurodiversity in the Classroom:  Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs...Read More

I am sickened by a news report from Reuters on the rapid rise in the use of standardized testing at the kindergarten level.  The push for academic accountability in the higher grades has been essentially pushed downwards through the grade levels and now sits like a 10-ton block of steel on what used to be literally a “children’s garden”...Read More

I think there should be a whole new movement in education called “children’s peak experiences in learning.” There ought to be books about it, M.Ed. and Ph.D. degree programs about it, tons of research about it.  Why?  Because when we observe learning at its best, only then do we have true benchmarks to evaluate the...Read More