Back To School

As the neighborhood kids (and the rest of America) are going back to school this week, our family just keeps rolling along with life as usual.  I have had a lot of time this month to just sit and think about the beauty of life learning and what is commonly referred to as unschooling. I know that the way we have chosen to raise and "educate" our children goes completely against the mainstream and that many (maybe even you ;-) see it as a horrible idea that we will end up regretting.  

I have always collected favorite quotes from books I read about education and also from online articles I come across.  I wanted to share them here, not only as a way of preserving them in one place as opposed to being scattered in my many notebooks and folders, but also as a bit of insight to any friends and family who read here.  Maybe this will be helpful to see why we choose this way of living.  It may not be the way you would do it, or the way you think is best, but we know deep down this is our path.  

This is living.

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"There is no difference between living and learning... it is impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as being separate."

-- John Holt 

  

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." 

-- Albert Einstein

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” 

-- Arthur Koestler

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society…But for me, education means making creators…You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.” 

-- Jean Piaget

 "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated."

-- Alec Bourne

"Answers are dead ends, even when they're correct.  Questions open the galaxies.  It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."  

-- James Thurber

"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: forget about it.  Think only about whatever you love.  Follow it, do it, dream about it.  One day you will glance up at your collection of Japanese literature, or trip over the solar oven you built, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." 

-- Grace Llewellyn

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." 

--  Albert Einstein

"Today for Show-and-Tell, I've brought a tiny marvel of nature: a single snowflake. I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water, just like every other one, when you bring it in the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I'll... be leaving you drips and going outside." 

-- Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes

"The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know."

-- John Holt

"There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom."

-- Joao Coutinho

"What is the purpose of industrial education? To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence? Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States and that is its aim everywhere else."

-- H. L. Mencken

"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life." 

-- John Holt

 

"All I am saying can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted."

-- John Holt

"I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

-- John Taylor Gatto

"We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls." 

-- Robert R. McGammon

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”  

-- Agatha Christie

"I wonder why so many parents still want to keep their children hidden away in schools, when they could be learning in the wonderful, bright, ever-changing, always-stimulating real world." 

-- Wendy Priesnitz

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.” 

-- Henry David Thoreau

“Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.”

-- John Holt

“Forced association is not socialization.” 

-- Adele Carroll

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry." 

-- John Taylor Gatto

"It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties." 

-- Alice Duer Miller

 "It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water." 

-- Claude Monet

“Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them” 

--John Holt

"For better or worse, we learn every day, wherever we are, whatever we're doing, whoever we're with. We learn good things, useful things, handy things - and we learn bad things, destructive things, things we might someday wish we hadn't learned. Life's like that. On the whole, though, learning serves us quite well, and we're constantly arranging and rearranging our learning so it's more useful to us."   

-- Helen Hegener 

“Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created ‘dangerous,’ free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.” 

--Laurie A. Couture

“What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent – in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.” 

-- John Holt

“We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.” 

~ Joseph Chilton Pearce 

“School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.” 

-- Ivan Illich

“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.” 

-- John Holt

“Children pursue life, and in doing so, pursue knowledge. They need adults to trust in the inevitability of this very natural process, and to offer what assistance they can.” 

-- Earl Stevens

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.” 

-- Carl Rogers

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” 

-- Isaac Asimov

“My ideal educational system would be a society in which knowledge was widely free and widely and freely shared, and children were everywhere trusted, respected, safe, valued, and welcomed.” 

-- John Holt

"I want to make it clear that I don't see homeschooling as some kind of answer to the badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were." 

-- John Holt

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.” 

-- John Taylor Gatto

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