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This is more or less the pedagogy laid out by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile, or On Education, the vade mecum of modern homeschooling

But the vast majority of our day was spent doing nothing. My mom talked about the importance of “hayloft time,” her term for idle reflection. Children needed to think, she was always saying. They needed to spend a lot of time alone. She believed that extended bouts of solitude would cultivate auton…

I was hiking to the top of sun-dappled, bouldery cliffs

I became an opinion columnist and an op-ed editor for the school newspaper, where I penned romantic paeans to the democratizing missions in Iraq and Afghanistan