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 […]

Parenting – despite our fears – is not usually an emergency. Usually, in parenting and in life, the best response to upsetting emotions is to reflect, not react. In other words, don’t take action while you’re triggered. -Dr. Laura Markham, from Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting