Unschooling Thought for the Day

…working together to solve problems offers a vote of confidence, a statement of trust, to a child. It says, “I believe that when you understand the moral issues involved, and when you have the necessary skills, you will act responsibly.” -Alfie Kohn, from Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, […]

The proper place and the best place for children to learn whatever they need or want to know is the place where until very recently almost all children learned it – in the world itself, in the mainstream of adult life…We made a terrible mistake when (with the best of intentions) we separated children from […]

https://unschoolers.org/unschooling-daily-thoughts/966/

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? -Henry David Thoreau

Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. -Bertrand Russell

Human beings are born intelligent.  We are by nature question-asking, answer-making problem-solving animals, and we are extremely good at it, above all when we are little. But under certain conditions, which may exist anywhere and certainly exist almost all of the time in almost all schools, we stop using our greatest intellectual powers, stop wanting […]

If your parent or teacher…is sitting in judgement of what you do, and if that judgement will determine whether good things or bad things happen to you, this cannot help but warp your relationship with that person.  You will not be working collaboratively in order to learn or grow; you will be trying to get […]

Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on. -Robert Frost

Practically everything we do in school tends to make children answer-centered. In the first place, right answers pay off. Schools are a kind of temple of worship for “right answers”, and the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar. -John Holt, from How Children Fail

It is not the teacher’s proper task to be constantly testing and checking the understanding of the learner. That’s the learner’s task, and only the learner can do it.  The teacher’s job is to answer questions when learners ask them, or to try to help learners understand better when they ask for help. -John Holt, […]

Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. -Plato