It’s been another week of competing ideas battling inside my head — an attempt to tame and mesh my thoughts on compliance within the system, accusations of laziness, the misnomer of being “behind,” AI usage, and the widespread distrust of non-coercive, self-directed learning (the actual driver of the scientific method) into something cohesive, or at least readable.

In trying to reconcile what connects all these things, I realized they’re all part of a broader attempt to dumb down our society — and I’d argue it’s a complicity most don’t recognize for what it is.

But why would we want people dumber, you ask?

The reason is fairly simple: people who are less likely to think critically and problem-solve are easier to manipulate and control. We’re witnessing this phenomenon in real time.

My job is to recognize and gently break down resistance to anything new and different — to change itself — and, in the process, build an understanding of the dire importance of developing scientific literacy, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving skills, not only for each individual’s growth but for society at large.

That resistance shows up differently in every family I work with. Sometimes the catalyst for seeking an alternative is a child’s refusal to go to school, or their non-compliance while there; other times it’s a recognition that they are not being well served by public education.

Even when that’s the case, and parents seek us out, they often ask, “What if my child isn’t already self-directed, and we jump into a non-coercive educational model, and they just do nothing all day and end up behind?”

Yes, it drives me a little crazy every time I hear it. Nevertheless, this is a genuinely fair question, given our cultural obsession with obedience and our addiction to control. My frustration isn’t with the question itself — it’s that people don’t grasp what compliance costs them. When a child learns to defer to all the rules — from ridiculous dress codes that police young women and girls, to giving the correct answer without understanding the “how” or “why” — they lose out on the benefits of observation, inquiry, experimentation, and productive failure. In short, the foundational components of the scientific method and learning itself.

What parents often miss is that an anxious, stressed-out kid usually isn’t learning much of real value in a coercive system anyway, because they’re too busy avoiding punishment to engage with anything else. And kids notice: chasing rewards is what you do when you’re willing to make yourself smaller to fit in.

My typical response addresses two flawed assumptions incorporated into that question: that any child is unmotivated and lazy, and that our current educational system is the model to measure them against. First, there’s no such thing as doing nothing. Research shows our brains need downtime — not only to recover, but to “file” everything they’ve taken in. Sometimes that looks like shutdown, doomscrolling, or gaming. Other times it looks like unending sleep. Either way, the brain is always working in the background. Second, every individual is a brilliant natural learner with their own strengths, challenges, interests, and internal timeline — which means an artificial developmental schedule based on age and grade level makes zero sense. No child can be “behind.” They’re only ever on their own schedule.

Late-stage capitalism only compounds all these problems. Corporations seek the cheapest way to make a buck — or billions — for their shareholders. With regulations thrown out the window, corruption and systemic complacency within the culture of capitalism become the easiest route to that end.

This all means we’re not only significantly less safe, but also less able to have our voices heard. It shows up in the enormous uptick in food and pharmaceutical recalls over just the past few weeks because of relaxed or non-existent safety protocol, people contracting and dying from preventable diseases, as well as the frustratingly widespread corporate use of AI to handle things like customer service.

Sadly, last week, I too was caught up in a seemingly never-ending AI circle of hell involving a refrigerator that we had ordered. Fortunately, after hours of uncertainty as to where it really had been delivered (hint: it wasn’t in Canton), we finally got it nearly a week later—but that is a tale for another day. 

I don’t want to give the wrong impression: AI is not inherently bad. It’s simply another tool in our arsenal — one that, used wisely and ethically rather than out of negligence, fake creativity, or corruption, can be useful and even life-changing.

Which brings us back to the urgency of cultivating the ability to think for ourselves. 

It’s the theme that connects it all. We aren’t living in a vacuum: the powers that be have enabled an educational system that pigeonholes and demands obedience, corporations that fail basic safety standards and automate personal interactions for profit, and a culture that accepts and promotes corruption and mediocrity, while pitting us against each other. Together, they’re coaching us to be an exhausted, manipulated citizenry — people who fail to ask questions, look the other way, and compliantly nod in defeated acceptance.
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The fix isn’t complex, only potentially unpleasant. Trust is the fundamental mechanism. Every individual has an inherent desire to learn and grow, and it looks different for each of us. We are all natural-born scientists, and when consistently given the opportunity, we can make critical observations, ask questions, experiment, and solve problems creatively. It means understanding that AI is one more apparatus to use intentionally, not something meant to “think” or “create” for us. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel — it simply means refusing to surrender our agency to the oligarchs and billionaires who would prefer we shut up and follow their lead.

Only nine days to DRC’s opening day! This coming week, I will be cleaning the summer dust (and layers of Digby hair) that have accumulated so that our space is bright, shiny, and ready for tons of creative energy. 

We have several volunteers ready to go—but there is always room for more!

​If you would like to share a skill or talent with our members regularly or for a one-off, please get in touch or complete the volunteer form here. 

Open Enrollment:

It is not too late to join us, in fact our enrollment is open all year. We encourage you to reach out with questions about our programs. 

Beyond the obvious moral decay and erosion of empathy in this country, I find myself wondering why so few are addressing a deeper, more dangerous crisis: a failure of imagination and creativity.

You need look no further than the personal attacks, insidious rumors, and bigotry—xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism—hurled about in place of fresh, innovative ideas to see that originality is no longer prioritized. 

The readiness to instigate drama, nastiness, name-calling, and plain old bullying against those with an actual vision tells me everything I need to know. There's no genuine interest in anything beyond the self; only a willingness to grasp for power, spread fear-mongering propaganda and hate speech, and chase the long con of grift. Most tellingly, there's no real intellect behind it—no capacity for the kind of empathetic, inventive originality that can solve the challenges facing society. 
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I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about why we’ve reached this impasse. But given my criticism of our current White House and our educational system, you can probably guess where I land. 

In this TED Talk from several years ago, the late Sir Ken Robinson explains why a lack of creativity is so damaging to society as a whole. 

I believe we can emerge from this crisis stronger—more resilient to future attacks on progress and creative ingenuity. However, we first need to recognize the dangers of banality, hypocrisy, and the lack of imagination, and how they affect our ability as a society to prioritize progress. 

Creativity is not a luxury reserved for artists and inventors; it is the baseline for compassion, open minds, critical thinking, and change itself. Without it, we fall back to the familiar, the divisive, the fear-mongering and propaganda that require no imagination at all. If we want something different, we have to believe it is possible—and then find the determination and vision to create it, one person and one innovative idea at a time. And we must support those brave enough to step up and conceptualize a new way forward. 

Another quiet week at the Center—gearing up for the beginning of the academic year on September 8th.. 

Volunteer Opportunity
With summer coming to a close, are you looking for something that will keep you engaged and connected through the long, dark days of fall and winter?

Deep Root Center is seeking volunteers to share their talents, skills, and interests and facilitate projects and activities with our student members. This is an opportunity to build relationships and support our goal of community-driven education.

DRC is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, & Friday from 9-3. Our goal is to host one volunteer each day between the hours of 10-2. Beyond that, we are completely flexible and happy to work within your schedule.

Get in touch or find the volunteer form linked here.

We look forward to meeting you!

It is hard to believe that there are only a bit more than two weeks of summer break left! DRC opens on Tuesday, September 8th. In addition to in-person programming, we also provide homeschool consultation services.

​Reach out to [email protected] to learn more.

Note: I have too many competing thoughts swirling through my head this week to untangle and tame into something manageable.  Many of those ideas are a result of spending a good amount of time writing the introduction and the beginning of the first chapter of my book, as well as my everyday observations that run the gamut from the never-ending national nonsense to the back-to-school retail craze.

Therefore, instead of diving headfirst into the mental struggle of unraveling my ruminations, I decided to take a breather and share the first draft of the Introduction with you all this week. Yes, it is very much a draft. If you are willing, please send feedback.  Thanks!

I always knew all those years of essays were a treasure trove of nuggets that could, at some point, be turned into something more solid and tangible. This is the year I finally decided to start that process. I spent three months sorting them — post by post, month by month, year by year — into thirteen chapters that best capture the trajectory of my work. Now, it's time to put them all together.
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As I reviewed all those posts, I realized that the throughline has been my attempt to challenge and change culture — not just in the educational realm, but in every corner of our severely broken system. As a trained anthropologist, perhaps that focus should come as no surprise. It only took reading through hundreds of posts to see that a good portion of them belonged in the "changing culture” chapter, and why the subtitle emphasizes that point.

Each chapter begins with a newly written introduction to its theme. Italicized and indented (This format won’t allow me to indent, so I set them apart with dividers.) excerpts from posts that speak to that topic are then woven throughout the body of the chapter, each with its title and original publication date, as in the example above. 

Thank you again for joining me on this look back at my personal growth and the creation of Deep Root Center — a place where kids are not coerced, but encouraged to follow their interests and curiosity, get creative, experiment, make messes, think critically, solve problems, and become their authentic selves. As mentioned in a later chapter, this isn't a utopia — but in my opinion, it's a hundred times better than a coercive, compulsory system that leaves so many kids struggling and unhappy.

As stated, I spent time this week writing the book, as well as talking to kids to create their homeschooling plans.  I also spent a few enjoyable hours at the Canton Farmers Market on Friday talking to folx about DRC.  

DRC Philosophy
Deep Root Center adheres to seven guiding principles as articulated by Ken Danford of North Star, the OG Liberated Learners Center in Sunderland, MA. This week’s social media posts highlighted three of them. For reference, you can find all seven here.

​DRC's tagline speaks to the sixth principle.
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Principle #6: We should mostly strive to “make possible” rather than “make sure.”
Most of the time, adults working with young people can’t truly make sure that young people learn any particular thing – learning just doesn’t work that way. A group of adults can decide that all fifth graders should learn fractions, but when it comes to each child’s genuine understanding and retention, we can’t actually make it happen or guarantee that it will happen. As adults, what we can do, however, is try to make things possible for young people – provide access, offer opportunity, figure out what kind of support will be most helpful, and do whatever we can to help navigate the challenges and problems that arise.

The second principle recognizes that school is optional. And even though it may sound provocative, it simply means that school is not the only place where learning happens; additionally, it is not always the best environment for everyone.
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Principle #2: Learning happens everywhere.
Conventional wisdom says that children “go to school to learn,” as though learning can only occur in places specially designed for that purpose. We believe that people learn all the time and in all kinds of places. It doesn’t have to look like school or feel like school to be valuable, and it’s not necessary to make distinctions between “schoolwork” and “your own hobbies” or “for credit” and “not for credit.” To answer a frequently asked question: "yes, everything counts!"

The first principle is based on the very real understanding that learning is natural.
Principle #1: Young people want to learn.
Human beings are learning creatures. We don’t have to persuade babies to be curious and to seek competence and understanding. The same can be true of youth. Rather than trying to motivate them, we support their basic human drive to learn and grow...

Open Enrollment
If you think DRC may be the place where your child can thrive, get in touch today. We are scheduling appointments to talk and visit for the last few weeks before the academic year starts—it will be here before you know it! Our opening day is Sept. 8th. After that, my days will be full, and it may be a bit harder to schedule a meeting. 

Recently, I've seen a flurry of educational professionals complaining and commiserating about the proliferation of cheating—specifically the surge in AI usage. I understand their frustration and commiserate with the challenges of the classroom in this era of technological advances.

Sadly, this is a continuation of the same old lament about the younger generation's inherent laziness, only now it includes their tendency to be bored and uninspired by anything that isn't digitized and built specifically for their entertainment.

Let's address the elephant in the room. I don't believe AI is the issue, nor are screens, the students, or the teachers. Unfortunately, they're all caught up in a system that's working exactly as designed, and it's failing our kids, as well as the educators who spend vast amounts of time and take great care to prepare classrooms and lessons.

Students are fed information and then rewarded for correct answers, not for their natural curiosity or their ability to think creatively to solve problems. Everything is pre-chewed, condensed, and canned for their consumption. They're not allowed to follow the joy of experimentation and making mistakes. So, when avoiding sticks and chasing carrots are the drivers of the current methodology, isn't it fairly obvious they'll use AI or whatever else gets them to the correct answer? Self-motivation is abandoned for preservation and compliance. 

When you hear that critical thinking and problem-solving are extinct, and laziness is on the rise, you only have to look as far as the system that's raising our children.
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To be clear, AI usage and cheating are not failures that can be attributed solely to students or educational professionals—they're massive indictments of the system itself. I'm in no way suggesting there's an easy "fix." However, if we want different behavior from our kids, we have to build a system that rewards curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to play, experiment, and potentially get it wrong, rather than conformity and obedience.

It has been another quiet week at DRC. I spent time consulting with families on homeschool documentation and meeting with DRC members to create their plans for the coming year. 

I have also completed sorting all the blog posts. The next step is writing the introduction!

Volunteer Opportunity
We are still seeking volunteers for this coming year. If you have a skill or talent that you are excited to share with our youth, please get in touch or complete the volunteer application here.

What do we mean when we say "explore the possibilities"?
It's not just a tagline. Those simple words hold the potential and promise of opportunities that emerge when students and adults alike are given explicit permission to follow their curiosity, get creative, make mistakes and the resulting messes, think critically, solve problems, and discover their authentic selves. 

Imagine being known as the rudest person in town. I cringe to think that anyone would willingly claim that identity—someone who moves through life with a sense of entitlement, always on the offensive, talking down to people they see as "beneath" them, generally behaving badly. And yet I know these people exist, because I've met a few, out there in the wild making life miserable for everyone around them.

I sometimes worry that my neurospicy, blunt, occasionally snarky comments might come across as disrespectful. But my internal people-pleasing chaperone is usually on duty, guarding every gesture, remark, and observation to ensure I come across as pleasant, witty, and respectful—even when I'm exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed, or angry.

These thoughts harken back to "Is It a Mask?", the post from two weeks ago. Is my people-pleasing chaperone holding up a mask that disguises my authentic self? Honestly, I don't think so.
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Even though I despise conflict, I'll stand up for myself and for others who need my support whenever it's necessary. Still, I always try to remain polite in those interactions while staying focused on what I actually want to achieve. 

These are the attributes I model for the young people I spend my days with. I want them to know I will always have their back. But sometimes I need to be direct and call a spade a spade—especially when behaviors are over the top and affecting others. They know I'll call it out, because I can't believe anyone actually wants to go through life known as the jerk (feel free to insert the less PC version) trashing everyone and everything they encounter.  

I want them to understand that their reputation matters. It shapes not only how other people see them, but more broadly, how they're able to positively contribute to their community and make it better. Alongside that, I want them to know that they can (and will) absolutely make mistakes—as long as they acknowledge them and work hard to make amends. 

That perfectly defines my goal: sending young people into the world who are known for their kindness, flexibility, and curiosity, a willingness to own their errors, to speak up for change when it's needed, and a readiness to use their creative problem-solving skills to make those changes happen—no matter how small they may seem.  

I am very happy to report a quiet week with no crises or other craziness at DRC. This is the time of year when I meet with student members and our many homeschool consultees, mostly by phone, to discuss specific information about what they want to study or accomplish this year so I can write their IHIPs.  I made a good head start on that this past week. 

Book Project
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I am slowly making headway on turning my blog posts into a book.  I have reviewed 10 years' worth and sorted them into their chapters; only three years to go! Once that process is finished, I can begin the actual writing and deciding how each of the posts fits into its assigned chapter. An actual finished book is a long way off, but I will be happy to move on from this tedious part to the point where I can begin to visualize it and use my creative energies. At some point, I will be looking for folx to give it a first read and offer feedback. Let me know if you are interested in helping. 

We currently have six volunteers lined up for this coming year, but would love to have several more to round out our schedule. Get in touch if you are interested in sharing your skill, talent, or general interests with young people eager to learn. Please share this opportunity with anyone in your network you think might be willing to help out.  The commitment is flexible; let us know what works best for you.  You can also complete the volunteer form here.

DRC is here for anyone who wants to join us. Get in touch if you think this may be the place for your child. Or learn more here.