Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. -Helen Beatrix Potter
Paley: How Children Teach Each Other
Children are able to teach one another best if they are permitted to interact socially and playfully throughout the day. -Vivian Gussin Paley, from The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: the Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom
Holt: What Schools Should Be
Schools should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know. The child who wants to know something remembers it and uses it once he has it; the child who learns something to please or appease someone else forgets it when the need […]
Sleeping Outside the Box: A Follow Up
Since writing my posts about our move to a family bed, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. Because we made the shift in our thinking gradually, each step that moved us closer to this decision seemed easy and natural. But looking at it from a more traditional perspective, it can seem quite radical (which is […]
Kohn: Teachable Moments
…there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a “teachable moment”, an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not, “You’ve misbehaved; now here’s what I’m going […]
George Bernard Shaw 1
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real – George Bernard Shaw
Dr. Markham Flight or Flight
Wondering how your child will learn if you don’t raise your voice? When kids are scared, they go into fight-or-flight. The learning centers of the brain shut down. Your child can’t learn when you yell. It’s always more effective to intervene calmly and compassionately. Besides, when you yell, you lose credibility with your child. Kids […]
Unschooling: Hierarchies
By definition, it would seem, if one person controls another, the two individuals have unequal status. -Alfie Kohn, from Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes
Paley: Children aren’t Seed Packets
Children do not appear with printed calendars, as on packets of seeds, to advise us when a given concept will germinate for them and burst into flower. -Vivian Gussin Paley, from The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter: the Uses of Storytelling in the Classroom
Unschooling: What School Feels Like
School feels like this to children: it is a place where they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you don’t do them or you don’t do them right. For children, the central business of school is not learning, whatever this […]