Unschooling Thought for the Day

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. -Anne Sullivan

Children who undertake to do things…do not think in terms of success and failure, but of effort and adventure.  It is only when pleasing adults becomes important that the sharp line between success and failure appears. -John Holt, from How Children Fail

The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense.  At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control; […]

…very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used.  The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives. -John Holt, from How […]

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.  We supress genius 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, […]

Consider what society would look like if 65 million trapped schoolchildren learning to be consumers were suddenly set to actively imagining themselves in independent livelihoods, adding value to the rest of the community; imagining themselves as producers instead of bored consumers. – John Taylor Gatto, from Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the […]

With few exceptions, invention is the provenance of youthful insight; cut that spring of ideas off by embedding the young in a network of rules and judgements, and you should expect important negative consequences. -John Taylor Gatto, from Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling