December 19, 2012 “A lot rides on our capacity to be who we’re not.” So remarked Christine LaCerva, director of The Social Therapy Group and the East Side Institute’s clinical training. Christine was one of six who I assembled to address the topic, “The Therapeutic Power of Performance,” at a plenary session...
December 16, 2012 I was in Serbia last week. I crammed a lot into four days and it was well worth it. I’ve been going to Serbia once a year for more than a decade and each time I experience the joy of people supporting other people to develop and, at...
December 5, 2012 As Allen Francis, one of the DSM-5’s most vocal critics, writes in his recent Psychology Today column, the final approval of the “deeply flawed DSM-5” by The Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association “will start a half or dozen or more new fads which will be...
November 19, 2012 This morning I learned that a dear friend of mine, Volker Bunzendahl, passed away last week. Volker was an exhuberant and passionate psychologist and human being. He moved from Germany to Denmark decades ago and made a home for himself and his family in the north of the...
November 3, 2012 Far Rockaway, Queens is one of the poorest, most isolated and forgotten neghborhoods of New York City, About 60,000 people live there on the Rockaway penisula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. More than 80% of them are Black and Latino, and the median income is under $28.000/year. Until...
October 26, 2012 Here is an update on the susension of Ian Parker from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)—asking us to call on MMU to at least make public what the charges being brought against Ian are. MMU has now decided that a disciplinary hearing will go ahead on the two charges that...
October 24, 2012 On day about a month ago I was shocked by an email about the suspension from Manchester Metropolitan Univesity in the UK of my friend Ian Parker. I had just seen Ian over the summer at a Marxism and Psychology conference we both participated in in Morelia Mexico....
October 17, 2012 “Schools for growth—ones where developmental learning occurs—are much more like theatrical stages than classrooms." I wrote those words, in 1997, as the opening sentence of my book, Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models. Fifteen years later, I believe it even more strongly. As school becomes more...
October 12, 2012 Contrasts! Two pieces in the New York Times early this week— “Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School” and “Invitation to a Dialogue: A Student’s Call to Arms.” The first is a prominently placed article (by Alan Schwarz, October 9, 2012). The second is a Letter to the...