Unschooling Thought for the Day

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 […]

…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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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

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 […]

Freedom to live and to think about life for its own sake is important and even essential to a child. -John Holt, from How Children Fail

If David Farrugut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. -John Taylor Gatto, from […]

We judge and evaluate [a child] in a place where he has not been comfortable enough to engage in good conversations. In school, he has felt in need of repairs. I must always assume, with any child, that school is the source of whatever problems exist in school before looking elsewhere. -Vivian Gussin Paley, from […]