Unschooling Thought for the Day

Children are subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail. Do they not, to some extent, escape and frustrate the relentless, insatiable pressure of their elders by withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from the scene? -John Holt, from How Children Fail

Only as I began to seek the children’s approval could I concentrate on individual needs and differences. If you want a certai nperson to like you, then you find out what makes him or her happy. I began to realize that I could not teach much to anyone unless the person liked me a lot. […]

…we assume that people naturally avoid challenging themselves, that it is “human nature” to be lazy. The evidence shows that if anything deserves to be called natural, it is the tendency to seek out optimal challenge, to struggle to make sense of the world, to fool around with unfamiliar ideas. -Alfie Kohn, from Punished by […]

Most of us learned as children that our feelings were unacceptable, even dangerous. Dr. Laura Markham from Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids

To a very great degree, school is a place where children learn to be stupid. A dismal thought, but hard to escape. Infants are not stupid. Children of one, two, or even three throw the whole of themselves into everything they do. They embrace life and devour it; it is why they learn so fast […]

If children have interest, then education happens. -Arthur C. Clarke    

Decisions about fairness, it seems, often appear as the result of someone’s tears. We teachers are not overly fond of crying when there is no physical hurt, but the children insist that crying means something is unfair and needs to be corrected. It is never a case, for them, of the adult “giving in” to […]

Teaching – “I know something you should know and I’m going to make you learn it” – is above all else what prevents learning. -John Holt, from How Children Fail

…if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless.  In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless – they are actually counterproductive. -Alfie Kohn, […]

This idea that children won’t learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the jargon of the behaviorists, “positive and negative reinforcements,” usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, “If we […]