My Favorite Quotes/Answers
ON INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOLING Great reasons to homeschool your children! The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
~ Lily Tomlin
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
~ Albert Einstein
As Paul Goodman has said, and it cannot be said too often, at the turn of the century, when only six percent of our young even finished high school, and half or less of one percent went to college, the whole country was run by dropouts. But now all roads lead through school. To fail there is to fail everywhere.
~ John Holt
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
~ Gandhi
Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
~ Wendy Priesnitz
I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.
~ Thomas Edison
A professor is someone who talks in other people's sleep.
~ Unknown
There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will
believe it.
~ H. L. Mencken
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
~ Nicholas Butler
I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
~ Albert Einstein
In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
~ Mark Twain
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
~ John Maynard Keyes
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
~ Albert Edward Wiggam
By bells and many other similar techniques [schools] teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
~ John Taylor Gatto
Retarded? Disturbed? Attention Deficit? When I read those weak excuses for the schools' failures, I have a definite Belief Deficit.
~ Donn Reed
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
~ Alexandre Dumas
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
~ Anne Sullivan
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
~ H. L. Mencken
When we make our laws and educational policies primarily for the parents who don't care, instead of for those who do, those laws are backwards. We urge that the burden of proof be on the state to show which mothers and fathers are not doing their job.
~ Dr. Raymond Moore
The greatest enemy of the excellent is the good.
~ American Proverb
ON INDOCTRINATION
Schools are indoctrinating our children. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
~ Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
~ H. L. Mencken
You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.
~ Doris Lessing
Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
~ Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
Funny; I wonder why on earth so many people send their kids to school.
Everyone is different. I homeschool because my educational philosophy comes from W.B.Yeats: Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
In schools, they pretty much use the pail filling method. This was one of my biggest frustrations as a teacher and why I stopped teaching in public schools.
When homeschooling, I can employ the fire-lighting method more often. Their education is much more engaging and experiential; they take classes or get involved in activities (sometimes alone, sometimes with groups) that really motivate and inspire them. Learning is not just a means to an end; it's a way of life.
Additionally, we homeschool so they can get better socialization. In school, socialization can be more negative than positive. I prefer putting kids in social environments where the kids are held to higher standards, where there are better role models.
It's been working for 13 years; the kids are happy, very active, doing well, pursuing their interests, one so far is off to higher education; so far I have no complaints.
~ANONYMOUS
If I know anything about homeschooling it's no family home schools for one reason. It's usually a laundry list of reasons.
For our family it's the follow reasons:
1) My child was injured at school by a teacher in Kindergarten so we pulled him out of school, prior to pulling him out he had his shoes stolen off his feet by another student, his backpack cut with scissors by another student when the teacher wasn't paying attention (of course we had to pay to replace it), he wasn't learning to read at school he was learning more at home on that subject, and he came home covered in fire ant bites from PE just to name a few
2) My son is at grade level in some subjects and several grade levels ahead in others. He is now in third grade. He is at grade level in Math but several grade levels ahead in reading. If he went to public school he would be forced to do work in reading far below his actual capability.
3) Homeschooling is flexible, it allows us not to have to follow the school calendar. My husband doesn't have a Monday-Friday 9-5 job, nor do most of my in-laws who work mostly in healthcare. If we need to celebrate a holiday on Tuesday instead of a Saturday or Sunday it's not a problem for our son to be included in what ever the family plans.
4) In our particular area the amount of time a public school child spends on the computer is maybe 15 or 20 minutes per week. In our families opinion, it is very important for children to understand and be able to use technology. My son does about 45 minutes on the computer of school work each day.
5) We get to pick our materials
6) Life experience is a very important part of the learning process for our family. We go on a field trip at least every two weeks. That's easily 26 field trips per year. I don't know of any school that does that many. Close to half of those offer classes specifically targeted at homeschoolers. Most major tourist destinations now offer programs for homeschoolers.
7) Our child hated getting up at 5:45 in the morning to get ready for school. My husband and I think a child never needs to hit the books before 9 am. I am sorry but I don't think a child is focused and ready to learn at 7:30 in the morning.
~Anonymous
Because one size doesn't fit all. Never has, never will.
~Anonymous
Unlearning School By Gordo
Schools take 15,000 hours from our lives. 15,000 hours that could have been used for the following:
running, jumping, kissing, thinking, taking a hike, building something, taking something apart, having an adventure, introspecting, taking a standardized test, conversing, laughing, dancing, playing a game, writing a story, having a snow ball fight, drawing a robot, listening to music, singing, riding a bike, coming up with a much better list This is a major crime, but schools do something worse. They eventually transform us into self-conscious adults, cut off from our inner wisdom, living lives we weren't meant to live.
To understand how this transformation works we need to remember what we were like as infants. To get right to the point: we were fucking amazing. Not only were we learning at a tremendous rate, but we were living life free of expectations and demands. We were motivated by life and by what felt right to us. No one needed to tell us to eat when hungry. No one needed to train us to explore the world. No one needed to manipulate us into connecting with others. In other words, the center of our evaluating process was completely within ourselves. It was a simple way to live, but it wouldn't last. Most adults don't appreciate that way of evaluating. They want values to come from them, not from within, and since they have power over us, they usually get what they want. Carl Rogers in his 1964 article, Toward a Modern Approach to Values, explains how this process begins.
The infant needs love, wants it, tends to behave in ways which will bring a repetition of this wanted experience. But this brings complications. He pulls baby sister's hair, and finds it satisfying to hear her wails and protests. He then hears that he is "a naughty, bad boy," and this may be reinforced by a slap on the hand. He is cut off from affection. As this experience is repeated, and many, many others like it, he gradually learns that what "feels good" is often "bad" in the eyes of others. Then the next step occurs, in which he comes to take the same attitude toward himself which these others have taken. Now, as he pulls his sister's hair, he solemnly intones, "Bad, bad boy." He is introjecting the value judgment of another, taking it as his own. He has deserted the wisdom of his organism, giving up the locus of evaluation, and is trying to behave in terms of values set by another, in order to hold love. Carl Rogers is not arguing that we all should be allowed to pull our baby sister's hair. Shame is just one of hundreds of possible options in situations like this. It just happens to be the preferred option for most parents, since it allows their values to become more prominent in our minds.
This process is accelerated when we get to school. Since we still need and want love, our teachers use this as a weapon to control us. When we do what they want they reward us and give us their approval. When we don't, they punish us and take away their love. This can be done through disapproval, humiliation, or by simply ignoring us. No matter how they do it, we get the message loud and clear.
We are also being trained by our peers. For many of us this is even worse than what we get in our homes and classrooms. In any oppressive environment, the oppressed are likely to turn on themselves and set up their own hierarchies. In most schools this means that the cool, tough, and popular students train everyone else to act in certain ways. One of the consequences of this is that most of us are trained to hide any sign of weakness from our peers and even to a large extent, our friends.
What does all this conditional love and approval do to us? First of all, we become self-conscious. We have to constantly worry about how we appear to other people in fear that we might lose their love and approval. This forces us to lie to others and put on masks. Letting people see our true selves becomes too risky. We even start to despise our true selves and push them away. Our inner wisdom is cut off, and we begin to live at the mercy of outside forces.
Have you seen those electronic collars that some dogs have to wear? Every time the dog goes out of the yard it gets electrocuted. The dog quickly learns not to cross the invisible boundary set by its owner. Eventually the dog learns this lesson so well that the owner can take the collar off. Same thing happens with us. We are trained by our parents, our peers, and our teachers to travel along narrow paths set by them, and then when we are finally released from their control we keep traveling those narrow paths.
We don't have to accept that future. We can decide to explore the life that is outside those paths. We can decide to throw away our introjected values and begin to listen to ourselves again.
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The unlearning process is simple to describe. We were trained by the use of conditional love; therefore our untraining will involve unconditional love. Let me describe what this means for me.
First, when I notice myself pushing some emotion away, I reverse course and try to feel and accept it as fully as I can. This is both painful and nourishing. This only works, though, if I notice the feeling before I automatically banish it from consciousness. Therefore mindfulness is needed. Mindfulness is a state of active, open, non-judgemental attention on the present. When I am mindful, I notice scary feelings arise in me while also noticing the urge to flee them, argue with them, or push them way. Then I lovingly embrace everything that flows through me.
Second, when I realize that I haven't been mindful, I go back and relive the banished emotion. For example, when I experience boredom, my automatic reaction is to quickly find something to do. Only after I find myself looking up baseball stats on players I don't know or care about, do I realize that I am partaking in an unrewarding activity in order to avoid feeling empty inside. Then I go back and try to experience that feeling of emptiness.
Third, I search for people who will love me unconditionally. This is difficult because I'm normally so scared of rejection that it is hard to even give someone a chance to love me unconditionally. Therefore I rarely do this, but when I do, the payoff is tremendous. When someone accepts me fully, it makes me think, "Maybe there is nothing wrong with me after all."
Fourth, I read books with loving and empathetic authors. Carl Rogers is one such author. I always feel safe and valued when I read his writings, especially his book, On Becoming a Person. Below is a relevant excerpt.
I feel that over the years I have learned to become more adequate in listening to myself; so that I know, somewhat more adequately than I used to, what I am feeling at any given moment--to be able to realize I am angry, or that I do feel rejecting toward this person; or that I feel very full of warmth and affection for this individual; or that I am bored and uninterested in what is going on; or that I am eager to understand this individual or that I am anxious and fearful in my relationship to this person. All of these diverse attitudes are feelings which I think I can listen to in myself. One way of putting this is that I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am. It becomes easier for me to accept myself as a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function.
This must seem to some like a very strange direction in which to move. It seems to me to have value because the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience--that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.
Fifth, I stop trying to get love from people who will only love me conditionally. This means I don't go after friends who might like my facade, but not the real person underneath. It also means that I stop trying to get approval from authority figures since they only approve of me when I do what they want.
Sixth, I enjoy nature. For me, nature is a place of refuge, where I can feel safe enough to put down my defenses for a while. It is a place where I can feel at peace with the world. And when I am back in society and my defenses are up again, I can remember that feeling of peace and build strength from it.
~Anonymous
Unschooling Quotes All quotes come from Growing without Schooling with permission of HoltGWS LLC.
When an adult comes up and asks, "Why aren't you in school?" you're supposed to soften it by saying, "My mom (or dad) teaches me at home." If you say, "I don't even go to school. So far, I've taught myself everything I want to know," they think you've run away from school or are a lunatic. Whereas the other way, they think your parent's a teacher and you get private lessons. The usual adult person in America thinks it's terribly hard to teach yourself something, and if you want to learn something, you've got to find somebody to teach it to you. This leads to the idea that kids are dumb unless taught or unless they go to school. GWS #73
What do [my teenagers] do all day? Why is it that I don't know? Why is it that I don't care? We don't keep journals or go on field trips or categorize the day's activities into subject areas. I can't stand the dead smell of all those fakey thought-up things. GWS #35
I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen and in the ninth grade. My mom and her boyfriend made it legally possible by turning our home into a private school. It's great. They've been providing me with resource materials and three years later I've become interested in subjects I would have shrieked about if I was still in high school. I'm writing science fiction stories, reading physics, and most importantly I've learned how to think for myself and make my own decisions. Basically, the freedom I lacked in school has enabled me to grow up. GWS #52
What amazes me is that these are not "gifted" children-they spend most of their time doing what they want to do (after chores, that is). In the winter we do structured studies for a couple of hours each morning but that's about it. Most of their learning is completely spontaneous. As I write, Maggie and Britt stopped by the orchard (where I'm typing) to tell me they are going off to the woods to look for a doe Britt spotted this morning and to spot birds and record their calls on paper... I could go on and on about my average kids and their wonderful growth. It seems they have simply more time to grow and develop than other children I know who have probably more potential but so much less time to realize it because they are always stuck away in a school building. GWS #35
I was angry at the way [schoolwork and classes] were intruding on my life. I hated them bitterly, and sometimes felt that I just couldn't keep it up... I read and reread some of the writers who articulated feelings I have had about schooling, like John Holt and James Herndon. And I heard echoes of many a summer's end: walking into a bookstore or a library as if it were a candy store, glancing longingly at all the books I wanted to read, and knowing that school would take up all the time instead. GWS #109
I believe that schools should not constantly test and measure us in order to rank us. By doing so, they teach us to believe that we can be tested and measured, or at least that everything important about us can be measured and the rest must not be important. The SAT might measure technical intelligence well. However, tests like the SAT can't measure important intelligence, like our insightful knowledge or our sense of wonder. GWS #106
Two things made those [high school] years bearable. First, literature. I'd play sick every chance I could so I could stay home and read. Or I'd play hooky and hide out all day in the county library. (Bless those librarians. They never reported me, though they must have realized that I was truant from school.) I read widely and wildly, whatever captured my interest, without direction or guidance. When I happened upon "The Waste Land," there was nobody to tell me what it was supposed to be about, how I was supposed to evaluate it, or that it was supposed to be very difficult. So I read all of T.S. Eliot's notes on the poem, then half a dozen critical studies, then a bunch of stuff on the Grail legend, and drew my own conclusions. GWS #66
I'm considering the possibility that it might be useful to me someday to have that piece of paper that says I have been through college and that it would make my family feel more comfortable about my choices. I may hold out on moral grounds, though; one way to delegitimize unfair and ridiculous credentialing systems is to boycott them, and the reverse is also true-taking part in them lends them your tacit support. GWS #109
Despite the freedom that I have now, I feel limited by my past. I spent a total of 86 months in public schools, attending for at least part of every grade but seventh. There are still two years before I would graduate, but I don't plan to go back. I am angry with society for the time they made me waste. I wish I could have the time back again, and learn the way I feel I should have.
Near the end of the day, the hallways empty as the kids leave early to go to the beach. They have to come back tomorrow, and I don't. I don't have to get up at five to catch a bus at quarter to seven. I don't have to stay up 'til one studying for a test on something I don't care about, don't need, and am going to forget the minute the bell rings. I will not have to struggle with locks that the school is allowed to open anyway, fight my way through throngs of kids who once spent hours learning how to walk quietly in line, eat a sixty-cent lunch not fit to feed to pets, let alone growing teenagers and children. I won't be fighting for space in a tiny mirror mounted on a graffiti-plastered wall in the girls' room, where the door has been taken off the hinges to expose any tell-tale cigarettes. I won't be sleeping through classes where I am supposed to be learning math, doodling through classes where I am supposed to be learning history, or daydreaming through classes where I am supposed to be learning French.
I'll be sitting at home reading a book. Since I am not in school, perhaps I will learn something. GWS #65
[My daughter] wouldn't let me tutor her and she wouldn't do all the educational things I had planned, like go to museums and stuff. She hung around in her bathrobe and drew pictures all day. For nearly three years. Summers, too.
Well, you should see her art work today. Fantastic! GWS #32
Over the years I've had a few long phone calls from parents who are concerned about the lack of academic interest shown by one of their children. Among other things that cause them worry is the fact that the child will show an interest in something and the parent will arrange for a chance to follow up on it-lessons, a visit-and shortly thereafter the child loses interest.
Somewhere in these conversations I've said something like: how would you feel if someone older than you-say your mother, or mother-in-law-lived with you now and always worried about whether you were OK, whether you read too little or too much, and whether she should do something to fix you up? Suppose she got upset because you signed up for a course somewhere and then dropped out? Suppose she made you continue? The parents laugh ruefully in recognition. "That would be awful. I'm always signing up for things and dropping out," they say.
There are many good reasons for dropping out of an adult education class-the brief exposure was enough to satisfy one's curiosity, something about the teacher turns one off, one has less time than one expected because of other changes in one's life. Aren't we lucky that, as adults, we can quit? Nobody tells us we have to finish what we begin, or worries about what that says about us. So maybe it's reasonable to extend that same privilege to our children. GWS #52
For me, there's a way in which my daughters' liberty from school and its constraints taught me how to be free, too, and gave me the permission to take risks I hadn't taken before. Starting New Moon was a big risk for us. Both Nancy (my wife) and I worked in management positions at established organizations, and were finally making decent salaries after years of living in poverty. Somehow, despite this, we took the risk of following a dream. Although it wasn't conscious at the time, I'm not sure we would have taken that risk if we hadn't been unschooling for several years. By experiencing how unschooling worked for the girls, it was possible for us to say, "We can do that too. Like the girls, we can follow our own interests and passions where they take us. We can stay home and enjoy each other's company and do something worthwhile together." And that's what we did! Just one more way unschooling has radically changed our lives. GWS #113
I am a Sophomore at Wellesley College. I started to write and call colleges in what would have been my sophomore year in high school. In the beginning of my senior year I decided to apply to three women's colleges: Converse, Hollins, and Wellesley. I was admitted to all three. All of these schools were interested in homeschooling. Hollins and Converse didn't know much about homeschoolers but Wellesley had had several apply each year for a while and knew what to expect.
Aside from the usual applications, I sent lists of books that I had read, my music repertoire, poetry I had memorized, books that I had written over the past four years, activities that I had participated in that I would not have been able to had I gone to regular school (a stained glass apprenticeship, an archaeological dig, the Florida State University bands and orchestras, etc.), a tape of me playing the harp, and pictures of the quilts I had made. In addition to regular essays I submitted articles I had written for a high school newspaper and GWS about homeschoolers and what being a homeschooler meant to me. My harp teacher, professors at FSU, and my high school physics teacher (I took a class at the high school) wrote letters of recommendation. The Wellesley admissions department says that these kinds of letters are very important for homeschoolers because they help the admissions board decide if the student will be able to do well at the college. GWS #96
Because of the flexibility of my schedule, at an early age I was able to volunteer at a local museum, one of the most exciting and valuable experiences I have ever had. In addition to its being simply a fun experience, I was able to parlay this early experience into more jobs during my high school [homeschooled] and college years in libraries, museums, and archives. Because of this experience, when I applied for the position I now hold, as Assistant Registrar and Curator of Photographs at the Maryland State Archives, I found that all those jobs I had had since I was fourteen added up to four and a half years of fulltime experience in my field-more than enough experience to exempt me from the M.A. requirement for my position! GWS #118
Seth did an interesting thing recently. He became interested in cycling and joined a bike club last spring. He's the youngest member by far. He trained for a race and did well last spring, goes on long rides with them (25-70 miles, 100 this Sunday), bought some needed equipment... This was getting expensive for him, so he made a deal with the owner of a local bike shop to work out purchase of things at cost. He won a summer race and came in third out of fifty (some experienced racers) a week ago. He reads biking magazines and books and plans his training and strategy. GWS #43
The most important thing I want to impress upon people about our family school is this: WE NEVER TAUGHT ANYTHING. My husband refused to allow it. The closest I came to "teaching" our four sons was during the evening reading-aloud session. We've waded, mulled, or stormed through the Old Testament, War and Peace, and Moby Dick, among many, many other classics. It was never required to come and listen, and one of our sons gave it up, preferring to read to himself. We provided for and supported the boys-never taught them. Their studies grew out of their own interests. They used all the local libraries and we sent for books from the state library. At one time, they spent months just fixing up an old fishing boat. We never really know what they were learning! My husband says we won't know the success or failure of our home schooling for a very long time, if ever. We always said they'd "graduate" from the home school when the direction of their lives was outward from home. And that is what has happened. GWS #35
I had been a schoolteacher before I began homeschooling. In school, I and other teachers knew that there were kids who could do the work but couldn't perform well on the test, and kids who got a high score on the test but didn't remember any of the material afterwards. I had been one of those kids myself, and I think doing well on tests gave me a false sense of self-worth, because although I did well on tests, I didn't magically have an understanding of what I could do or wanted to do, and when I graduated I remember feeling like a phony. Also, when I was a student, I remember that there were some kids in the class who clearly had a real grasp of the material, they really connected with it, but they didn't do as well on the tests . . . In some way, I learned that truly understanding the material wasn't necessarily the best thing. . . When I began homeschooling . . . I didn't like the idea of [my children] judging themselves, or limiting themselves, according to what the test said. GWS #100
Things finally got so bad this year in eleventh grade that I said, "That's it-I'm not going back to school anymore," and I didn't. I had a few months of recuperation, which meant doing whatever I felt like doing, be it baking, reading, cutting recipes, or watching a movie. I had a lot of guilt feelings during that time about not being in school, but fortunately I have wonderful parents who reassured me that what I had done was OK. GWS #80
I'm fourteen. I've never been to school (except one day with my cousin). I have been trading with neighbors for two years. I trade babysitting, washing dishes, and money for lessons. I have four lessons a week: sewing, weaving, botany, and piano. It works great if you have friendly neighbors. GWS #32
Lora only read what she was forced to read when she was in school, and I would sometimes coerce her by reading one chapter out loud to her and then having her read the next to me. All of a sudden, during the summer between school and homeschool, she became an avid reader... I don't know how many books she read that summer, but I was amazed-it was as if now that she didn't have to, and she was free, she wanted to read. She has read over sixty books in each nine months of homeschooling. If we did nothing else these two years, I consider that a major accomplishment. GWS #76
Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see in families who have homeschooled their children from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life . . . Most children are very hurt and angry about what has happened to them and to their peers in school. As long as they stay in school that anger must remain under control. When they come home, it all begins to come out. It may show up in extreme highs and lows, negative emotional outbursts, or long periods of apparent depression. GWS #76
A change that pleases me very much this year was to watch our son Steve (twelve), who spent four years in public school, and who spent his first year of homeschooling asking for "assignments," become a more self-motivated learner. He became interested in mechanical drawing when I gave him a beginning drafting set and he spends a lot of time designing cars and space ships. He has discovered science fiction and reads Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and others with great enjoyment (he has always read a lot, but despises the school-type reading programs where one must answer questions to prove comprehension). We both enrolled in the IBM Systems computer course at the state Vo-Tech school and he thoroughly enjoyed that-the perfect classroom situation, in my opinion, no tests, no grades, just people voluntarily coming to learn about something which they were interested in, from a helpful expert in the field. Since Steve's career goals tend toward the technical at this point, he works real hard at mathematics, and at his request we added the Key Curriculum algebra and geometry series to his regular sixth grade math. He surprised me this year by informing me that he didn't want to take a summer break from his schoolwork! GWS #45
I still didn't know what to expect, or what I would want to do with the time, because back then I wasn't interested in much of anything. We decided to start homeschooling on the day that school started, and it should have been like any other day, except we didn't know what to expect of one another. We didn't know what mom was going to do, if mom was going to assign lots of stuff. My attitude was still so rebellious. I was so fed up with school that I felt I didn't want to learn anything. There was so much tension that first week.
The change was very gradual. Your whole thinking changes. In school, everything's programmed for you, this is how you have to think, and then all of a sudden you're on your own, and you don't know what you want to do. It was so hard at the beginning, but I knew there was no way I would go back to school, and I think we all knew it would get better if we stuck it out. GWS #64
When we took the children out of school nearly two years ago, we had advice from several people, among them Dr. Pat Montgomery [director of the Clonlara Home Based Education Program], She told us if we would let the children follow their own interests, and just help them when they needed help, they would learn more than if we put them on a pre-planned curriculum.
I respected Dr. Montgomery, and was grateful for her help. But I just couldn't see any glimmer of hope in Becky [fourteen]. It seemed that seven years of public school had successfully stamped out any inclination she might have had to learn. By her own admission, she had learned to cram for tests, make A's and B's on her report cards, and promptly forget almost everything she had "learned." Whenever I allowed her free rein on "school," her one interest was mindless fiction-nothing of any value that I could see. Pat tried to encourage me, but I had the misgivings and insecurities that I see in so many other parents new to home-schooling. I was afraid Becky would learn nothing at all. So-we embarked on a "curriculum." It turned out to be just a duplication of the old public school pattern. So I went pretty easy with it, still allowing her freedom, and limiting her fiction reading to what I felt was least objectionable.
But, Pat was right. It finally happened. This year Becky progressed from Louis L'Amour Western fiction to an interest in Western history, then to the history of the United States, and is now in the process of memorizing the Constitution word for word. GWS #28
I started by sending a questionnaire to all the families listed on the mailing list of our group, Unschoolers Support. I asked them to list things they'd like to learn, teach, share, or exchange. Now we have Connections, a list of people from all over Connecticut who want to share their knowledge, ideas, goods, services, activities. A crucial difference between Connections and school is the matter of choice. In Connections, whatever is learned is at the learner's request. It's a voluntary arrangement. We list what is being offered and what is being sought, and then it's up to each person to use our mailing list to contact someone. People then make their own arrangements about time and place to meet, methods to use, compensation, etc. I don't take responsibility for anything beyond listing the names, and I made that clear both because I didn't want to be in an administrative position and because I believe people can be responsible for whatever they choose to do. That means that I can't guarantee that anyone who is offering to teach something will indeed be a good teacher. That's up to the learner to figure out. GWS #113
I wanted to continue taking Latin with my wonderful high school Latin teacher. I also wanted to be free to take an elective or two at the school if I ended up choosing to. The school administrators seemed to think I was crazy for believing I could get a better education outside of their prestigious school than in it. Even worse, I had the further audacity to assume that the school people would agree to be an academic side dish to my educational feast. As it has happened, I have been taking Latin all year without the school's official permission, although they do know I'm doing it. It wasn't until March that we made any sort of headway in communicating with the administrators. I've learned that clear, straightforward persistence is the best way to go. I've also found that talking to a lot of the teachers around the school instead of to the administrators is the best way of drawing support... I now take both the Latin class and a public speaking class at the high school. GWS #105
Steve, thirteen, developed a strong interest in freshwater fish. Aside from actually going fishing, which is his very favorite thing to do, he managed to read every available book in the library, including five volumes of a fish encyclopedia. He worked out a deal with a friend who is a graduate student in fisheries, to supply him with worms and perch fillets for his specimens. In return, Steve received a large, fully-equipped aquarium, in which to keep his own specimens. A highlight of the year was when he got to "seine" a local river (drag the river with huge nets to bring up small fish to study) with the curator of the University Life Sciences Museum. Next week, he starts an apprenticeship with the ranger at a nearby lake (who happens to be one of the most knowledgeable naturalists around). He will be learning, among other things, how to manage a camping and fishing facility. This interest in fish led into many other areas, as a real interest always does-climate, pond and stream ecology, life cycles of insects, etc.
My older children continually reinforce my belief that when a child has an interest in something, they have a real need to plunge much deeper into the subject than a normal school curriculum ever allows. GWS #53
For our first session, I brought in some books by Raymond Smullyan (The Lady Or The Tiger and What is the Name of This Book?) consisting of all sorts of logic puzzles. These books are about as far away from math textbooks as you can get. They are chock full of amusing puzzles-pure mathematical candy. The puzzles are not meant to illustrate important mathematical principles; they are simply fun. But they are incredibly rich, mathematically speaking. The puzzles escalate in difficulty as the book progresses, and solving them requires careful, rigorous, systematic thinking-in other words, mathematical thinking...
I hope [the unschoolers] came to see mathematics less as the sort of necessary baggage school people say one ought to carry around and more as a way of looking at and exploring the amazing variety of patterns in the world around them, as an experience that can be as fun, as fulfilling, and as beautiful as art, drama, or music. GWS #107
A lot of people don't know how many options are open to them, and we thought that if we all talked to each other about what we were doing with our lives, each of us could make our own lives more exciting as we learned about our opportunities. Another goal we had was to spread the word about unschooling, because it's a very misunderstood concept. GWS #112
[Emily] sent out a survey to the group, listing some topics that she thought were interesting, and asking for feedback. Every September the group gets together for a business meeting, and at that meeting last fall they brainstormed a list of things that they wanted to study but didn't feel they could easily study on their own and would enjoy studying with a group. Many people mentioned foreign language, but they wanted different languages, so that wouldn't work well. The two other topics that emerged were science and the arts. So that led us to organize a fifteen-session biology program, and then we had a ceramics program at a century-old historic pottery in this area...
There are about forty kids in the group all together, and they come from within about an hour's drive of Detroit. Of course, not everyone participates in every activity. Some activities have to be limited in size, and not everyone is interested in every activity anyway. Sometimes we only get three or four people, and that can be fun, too. A lot of friendships have grown among kids in the group. Emily now feels that she has a good group of pals. She has made it a point, in all the flyers she sends out, to say that this is a nonsectarian group, that we don't favor any one philosophy, in order to welcome all homeschoolers. Consequently, the group is really a mixture of people-we have people homeschooling for religious reasons, people homeschooling for academic or other philosophical reasons. The group has become racially integrated, too, which we're very grateful for. The kids are meeting people from many different backgrounds, with many different kinds of life experiences, and the friendships really cross those lines. GWS #94
When all my friends were trying to decide what they were going to do after high school, I started doing the same thing. Among my friends, there seemed to be three choices going around: go to college, get a job, or join the military. I decided that the military wasn't for me. I thought about college, but decided that this wasn't the right time for me. Looking at where I wanted to go and what kind of career I might want, and thinking of all the people I've heard about who changed their jobs halfway through their lives to do what they always wanted to do, I decided that if I want to do something that takes a college degree, I can get one later.
So I looked at what I wanted to do with my life now and I decided the answer was travel. That is when I conceived my plan to see America. .. Different lifestyles, cultures, and ways of doing things interest me.
I have a good friend in Massachusetts who I met through GWS. In the summer of 1987 I went up to her farm for a week and became a part of her family. She taught me about taking care of her horses and I helped out, including cooking, and I went with her to various community activities. After that visit I went up two more times. Five days after I got my driver's license, I started on a two-week driving trip to Massachusetts and back. That's the kind of thing I'd like to do with other families across the country, to come in and live as a useful member of the family. GWS #74
I am friends with the adults who live in the house next door to u s . . . Dick is interested in bicycling and philosophy and Crunch is interested in word games, movies, and sports. These are all things that I am interested in, which is one of the reasons I immediately became friends with them. The other reason is that they take me seriously and respect what I have to say about things. There are a few things that I talk to them about that I don't talk to most of my friends about who are closer in age to me (I'm thirteen) -for instance, politics and education.
I don't think my friendship with them is very different from my friendships with other teenagers, except for the fact that we have better conversations. We often fool around with each other the way I would with friends my age. I think there are many things that I can learn from them, but that doesn't make me feel that they are necessarily superior to me. There are probably things that they can learn from me also. I do think that we have a very equal friendship, most likely because they respect me in the same way that I respect them. GWS #74
We have been very active this year in the peace movement, and this has provided the older boys with a very direct type of learning in the area of "social studies." We have constructed a section of the Peace Ribbon, regularly met with and written to our representatives (they were quite thrilled to get their first correspondence from their Congressmen), viewed numerous films and attended lectures on Central America, and met priests, nuns, and refugees for some first-hand information about U.S. involvement in Latin America. Because of these experiences, they follow the news and current events with great interest, enjoy reading about the geography and history of Central America, and even practice their Spanish. GWS #45
We almost always start new experiences as experiments. That helps us define more clearly what we want and what parts of the current arrangement are on target... Though many of our short-term experiments have ended up lasting much longer, proposing the idea as short-term makes it easier for the adult to say yes...
We look for people actively involved in their area of interest. We look for an artist, not an art teacher, a Spanish-speaking person, not a Spanish teacher, a wood worker, not a shop teacher, a chemist, not a chemistry teacher. (Of course, sometimes these are one and the same.) Second, we look for people who see themselves as learners. Generally, if someone believes that he has a complete body of knowledge, he tends to be less enthusiastic and more rigid about how he shares his information. On the other hand, people who view themselves as just further along the spectrum of learning about their subject will share not only their expertise but also their own challenges and confusions... GWS #112
Besides my dad, there are three people in particular who have helped me learn more about computers. First, Mr. Warner was my 4-H Club instructor. He taught me the most commonly used BASIC words. He explained what the commands "PRINT," "GOTO," and "INPUT" meant. Also, he taught me about flow charts. Knowing about flow charts helped me to write my own programs. He also introduced me to some new programs. Before I met Mr. Warner I knew nothing about computers; I am very glad that I met him through 4-H.
Second, Mrs. Perm is a computer instructor at a school. She goes to the same church as I do. When she found out that I was interested in computers, she invited me to work on them with her. Almost every Sunday after church I go over to the school with her and work with the computers in the classroom. I play computer games and write programs. I enjoy these Sundays very much. Mrs. Perm has also lent me books about computers. Through her, I have gained more appreciation for what computers can do. I am happy that she takes the time to allow me to work with her.
When I first got my own computer, I didn't know how to work any of the software. I found out that one of the dads in my YMCA Trailblazer group, Dr. Loader, had the same computer and printer as I did. He offered to help me figure out some of the software. I had a lot of questions about word processing programs in particular. Dr. Loader happened to have a word processing program that was easy to use and he copied it for me. He also spent a lot of time answering questions for me over the phone-and in the beginning I had a lot of questions! He invited me over to his office so that he could better explain how the programs worked. Once he even came over to my house on his lunch hour to help me print a file. I'm really grateful for all the time he has given to me.
I'm really fortunate to have all of these friends who know about computers and are willing to help me. GWS #14
I found learning Japanese without a teacher or textbook to be both challenging and enjoyable. The key was having the right attitude. This included realizing that learning is sometimes hard work. However, it is fun, it is much easier and has a more lasting effect. It also included looking for every opportunity to use what I was learning. My family hosted at least six Japanese exchange students over the course of eighteen months. Between their visits I reviewed what I had learned and took in some more information from my CD ROM program and my grammar book...
The one thing that helped me the most was talking with someone who is Japanese. It is essential to understand how words were pronounced right away. This helps eliminate a lot of confusion...
I think homeschoolers benefit by sharing what they have learned, so I did just that. I prepared a three-hour hands-on presentation on the Japanese language and culture for homeschoolers in my support group. Some of the things I shared with them were origami, basic Hiragana, introduction to conversational Japanese, some of the gifts we received from our various students, and the Tea Ceremony... Giving this presentation allowed me to review what I had learned about the Japanese and their language. GWS #106
Grant is seventeen now and works as a carpenter while preparing to take his G.E.D. test. Graham, fourteen, has taken a breather from his violin lessons... He does quite a lot of auto repair with my husband, and is becoming very skilled and responsible. At his age, he loves anything to do with cars, and never complains about unloading livestock feed since it involves driving to the barn, backing up, etc., and maybe going once or twice up and down the driveway for good measure. GWS #37
I act a lot in our local community theatre... This past March I was in Brighton Beach Memoirs. I was the only kid under sixteen in the cast. Being with all those adults really gave me a professional feeling. The adults were so serious and fifty kids weren't running around making noise. I felt that the play was more realistic than a bunch of kids on stage standing around waiting to say their lines. When I am in a play with other kids I want to hang around and play with the other kids and not really watch the play and pay attention. That is nice too, but I don't feel professional. GWS #68
Unschooling Quotes
(I found most of these in The Teenage Liberation Handbook; others were found elsewhere.) "I recognize June by the flowers, now. I used to know it by review tests, and restlessness." -Lisa Asher, unschooled teen
"We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." -George Bernard Shaw
"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school." -George Bernard Shaw
"The only thing I didn't do in school was learn." -unschooler Jason Lescalleet
"The Indian schools were like jails and run along military lines, with roll call four times a day...The schools are better now than they were in my time. They look good on the outside. More modern and expensive. The teachers understand the kids a little better, use more psychology and less stick. But in these fine new buildings Indian children still commit suicide, because they are lonely among all that noise and activity. I know of a ten-year-old girl who hanged herself...When we enter the school we at least know that we are Indians. We come out half red and half white, not knowing what we are." -Lame Deer, Lakota Medicine Man
"I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught." -Winston Churchill
"I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony." -Winston Churchill
"How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude." -Winston Churchill
"Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other in both mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day in the theatre to applaud 'Hernani'." -Robert Louis Stevenson
"School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense amd common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not." -H. L. Mencken
"Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it." -Madeleine L'Engle
"The schools ain't what they used to be and never was." -Will Rogers
"Education with inert ideas is not only useless, it is above all things harmful." -A. N. Whitehead
"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." -George Santayana
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts." -Henry Adams
"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you." -John Updike
"We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge." -Rutherford Rogers
"Every day I went to school was a constant attack on my self-worth. I learned not to believe in myself. It was a bombardment from all directions; the teachers were saying how bad I was doing in their classes, my family was ashamed of my grades, and the students were attacking me about everything under the sun! I was like a plant trying to grow in darkness--it doesn't. It all left me afraid to dream my dreams-afraid to be my true self! Who wants to show their true self if they're just going to get a rock hurled at it?! The real question is: how do we undo the damage done? We have to take time to dream again, not other peoples', but our own precious dreams that mean everything to us. Our dreams are our life maps." -unschooler Jenny Smith
"Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see from families who have homeschooled their kids from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life." -Judy Garvey in GWS #76
"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school." -Saki (H.H. Munro)
"You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself." -Galileo
"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be." -Albert Einstein
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
"It is... nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." -Albert Einstein
"When was the last time you saw a tombstone with SAT scores inscribed on it?" -Edward B. Fiske
"The child who attends public school typically spends approximately 1,100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these -- 220 -- are spent, as the educators say, 'on task'. Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent, are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters." -Homeschooling For Excellence
"Most people, most of the time, learn most of what they know about science and technology outside of school." -National Science Foundation
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school." -Margaret Mead
"I hate, loathe and despise schools....School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way." -Maurice Sendak (author of "Where the Wild Things Are")
"Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside. Most of the information received meant absolutely nothing to me. For example, I was chastised for not being able to remember what states border Nebraska and what are the states of the Gulf Coast. It was simply a matter of memorizing the names, nothing about the process of memorizing or any reason to memorize. Education without either meaning or excitement is impossible. I longed for the outdoors, leaving only a small part of my conscious self to pay attention to schoolwork.
"One day as I sat fidgeting in class the whole situation suddenly appeared very ridiculous to me. I burst into raucous peals of uncontrolled laughter, I could not stop. The class was first amused, then scared. I stood up, pointed at the teacher, and shrieked my scorn, hardly taking breath in between my howling paroxysms." -Ansel Adams (who dropped out of school at age twelve and began taking photographs)
"Oh, yes, I went to the white man's schools. I learned to read from schoolbooks, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on man-made pages. I turn to the Great Spirit's book which is the whole of his creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. You know, if you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit had provided you and me with an opportunity for study in nature's university, the forest, the rivers, the mountains, and the animals, which include us." -Tatanga Mani, Stoney Indian
A letter from Native Americans to settlers, dated 1774:
We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen to not be the same with yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences, but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, ...neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Councellors, they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men out of them.
"I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone." -Woody Allen
"As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality." -Franz Kafka
"I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water." -Claude Monet
"It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry." -John Taylor Gatto
"The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders." -John Taylor Gatto
"Public school--where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression." -Emma Goldman
"There can be no education without leisure; and without leisure, education is worthless." -Sarah Josepha Hale
"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner." -Aleister Crowley
"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training." -Anna Freud
"If the student fails to learn, the teacher fails to teach." -unknown
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." -Oscar Wilde
"How is it that little children are so intelligent while men are so stupid? It must be education that does it." -Alexandre Dumas, fils
"Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing." -Ilya Ehrenburg
"Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be 'socialized.'" -Robert Lindner
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." -Plato
"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." -Mark Twain
"It is easier for a teacher to command than to teach." -John Locke
"An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear." -Nietzsche
"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught." -Vauvenargues
"The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron." -Horace Mann
"Why have kids just to get rid of them? I'm opposed to the whole nonsense." -Gomez Addams, on the original "Addams Family" show.
"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college." -Lillian Smith
"I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma." -L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
"Love goes towards love as schoolboys from their books; Love from love, toward school with heavy looks." -Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, 2:2:156
"School is like a lollipop. It sucks until it is gone." -Ashley Salvati
"How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?" -Henry D. Thoreau
"The more I think about it the more I think high school is seriously warped." -J.S. Feliciano, Pump up the Volume
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." -Paul Simon
"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is." -Isaac Asimov
"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." -Grace Llewellyn
"It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young." -Bertrand Russell
"We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. Hey teacher, leave the kids alone." -Pink Floyd
"N is for Neville, who died of ennui." -Edward Gorey, Gashlycrumb Tinies
"Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how." -John Holt
~http://www.nyctophilia.net/unschool/quotes.html
~ Lily Tomlin
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
~ Albert Einstein
As Paul Goodman has said, and it cannot be said too often, at the turn of the century, when only six percent of our young even finished high school, and half or less of one percent went to college, the whole country was run by dropouts. But now all roads lead through school. To fail there is to fail everywhere.
~ John Holt
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
~ Gandhi
Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
~ Wendy Priesnitz
I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.
~ Thomas Edison
A professor is someone who talks in other people's sleep.
~ Unknown
There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will
believe it.
~ H. L. Mencken
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
~ Nicholas Butler
I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
~ Albert Einstein
In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
~ Mark Twain
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
~ John Maynard Keyes
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
~ Albert Edward Wiggam
By bells and many other similar techniques [schools] teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
~ John Taylor Gatto
Retarded? Disturbed? Attention Deficit? When I read those weak excuses for the schools' failures, I have a definite Belief Deficit.
~ Donn Reed
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
~ Alexandre Dumas
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
~ Anne Sullivan
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
~ H. L. Mencken
When we make our laws and educational policies primarily for the parents who don't care, instead of for those who do, those laws are backwards. We urge that the burden of proof be on the state to show which mothers and fathers are not doing their job.
~ Dr. Raymond Moore
The greatest enemy of the excellent is the good.
~ American Proverb
ON INDOCTRINATION
Schools are indoctrinating our children. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
~ Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
~ H. L. Mencken
You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.
~ Doris Lessing
Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
~ Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
Funny; I wonder why on earth so many people send their kids to school.
Everyone is different. I homeschool because my educational philosophy comes from W.B.Yeats: Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
In schools, they pretty much use the pail filling method. This was one of my biggest frustrations as a teacher and why I stopped teaching in public schools.
When homeschooling, I can employ the fire-lighting method more often. Their education is much more engaging and experiential; they take classes or get involved in activities (sometimes alone, sometimes with groups) that really motivate and inspire them. Learning is not just a means to an end; it's a way of life.
Additionally, we homeschool so they can get better socialization. In school, socialization can be more negative than positive. I prefer putting kids in social environments where the kids are held to higher standards, where there are better role models.
It's been working for 13 years; the kids are happy, very active, doing well, pursuing their interests, one so far is off to higher education; so far I have no complaints.
~ANONYMOUS
If I know anything about homeschooling it's no family home schools for one reason. It's usually a laundry list of reasons.
For our family it's the follow reasons:
1) My child was injured at school by a teacher in Kindergarten so we pulled him out of school, prior to pulling him out he had his shoes stolen off his feet by another student, his backpack cut with scissors by another student when the teacher wasn't paying attention (of course we had to pay to replace it), he wasn't learning to read at school he was learning more at home on that subject, and he came home covered in fire ant bites from PE just to name a few
2) My son is at grade level in some subjects and several grade levels ahead in others. He is now in third grade. He is at grade level in Math but several grade levels ahead in reading. If he went to public school he would be forced to do work in reading far below his actual capability.
3) Homeschooling is flexible, it allows us not to have to follow the school calendar. My husband doesn't have a Monday-Friday 9-5 job, nor do most of my in-laws who work mostly in healthcare. If we need to celebrate a holiday on Tuesday instead of a Saturday or Sunday it's not a problem for our son to be included in what ever the family plans.
4) In our particular area the amount of time a public school child spends on the computer is maybe 15 or 20 minutes per week. In our families opinion, it is very important for children to understand and be able to use technology. My son does about 45 minutes on the computer of school work each day.
5) We get to pick our materials
6) Life experience is a very important part of the learning process for our family. We go on a field trip at least every two weeks. That's easily 26 field trips per year. I don't know of any school that does that many. Close to half of those offer classes specifically targeted at homeschoolers. Most major tourist destinations now offer programs for homeschoolers.
7) Our child hated getting up at 5:45 in the morning to get ready for school. My husband and I think a child never needs to hit the books before 9 am. I am sorry but I don't think a child is focused and ready to learn at 7:30 in the morning.
~Anonymous
Because one size doesn't fit all. Never has, never will.
~Anonymous
- School sucks because if you don't like it, most people automatically think there's something serious wrong with you.
- School ruins learning. In school, learning is all about memorizing things, answering questions, and writing loads of crap on topics you don't care about.
- Because you're forced to go there, and if you want to try some other alternative, you need to get parental permission first. School is essentially pointless forced labour without pay.
- It sucks because people expect you to treat school as the most important thing in your life. Nevermind what you'd rather be doing.
- School sucks because once you're done, you'll probably forget 90% of what you "learned" there and burn all your books anyway. All you'll be left with is a diploma stating that you survived 12 years of hell. And very few people (besides your parents) will even want to look at it.
- Because talking to your friends is a crime at school.
- It sucks because even if you're bored out of your mind, you'll still get all the blame for not participating in class.
- School suppresses independent thought - if you disagree with the teacher, you're in trouble. If you dare to think of a new way to do something, it's automatically wrong.
- School sucks because if you do what they say and do all your work, you don't get time off - they'll just expect even more from you in future. And someone who cheats on their work and tests can just as easily do better than you.
- School sucks because life is short, and you'll never get that time back.
- School makes everyone around you panic over the smallest little things that none of them (or anyone else) will care about a few years down the line.
- Even when you go home, school invades your life by giving you homework as well.
- It sucks because even though school has all these problems, if you mention any of them, you'll be the one they blame, no matter how right you may actually be.
- School sucks because every now and then it does something useful for someone, and then everyone goes all "Look! That's proof that school is good for you!"... It's like getting free ice cream in hell - it just doesn't quite make up for all the other stuff
Unlearning School By Gordo
Schools take 15,000 hours from our lives. 15,000 hours that could have been used for the following:
running, jumping, kissing, thinking, taking a hike, building something, taking something apart, having an adventure, introspecting, taking a standardized test, conversing, laughing, dancing, playing a game, writing a story, having a snow ball fight, drawing a robot, listening to music, singing, riding a bike, coming up with a much better list This is a major crime, but schools do something worse. They eventually transform us into self-conscious adults, cut off from our inner wisdom, living lives we weren't meant to live.
To understand how this transformation works we need to remember what we were like as infants. To get right to the point: we were fucking amazing. Not only were we learning at a tremendous rate, but we were living life free of expectations and demands. We were motivated by life and by what felt right to us. No one needed to tell us to eat when hungry. No one needed to train us to explore the world. No one needed to manipulate us into connecting with others. In other words, the center of our evaluating process was completely within ourselves. It was a simple way to live, but it wouldn't last. Most adults don't appreciate that way of evaluating. They want values to come from them, not from within, and since they have power over us, they usually get what they want. Carl Rogers in his 1964 article, Toward a Modern Approach to Values, explains how this process begins.
The infant needs love, wants it, tends to behave in ways which will bring a repetition of this wanted experience. But this brings complications. He pulls baby sister's hair, and finds it satisfying to hear her wails and protests. He then hears that he is "a naughty, bad boy," and this may be reinforced by a slap on the hand. He is cut off from affection. As this experience is repeated, and many, many others like it, he gradually learns that what "feels good" is often "bad" in the eyes of others. Then the next step occurs, in which he comes to take the same attitude toward himself which these others have taken. Now, as he pulls his sister's hair, he solemnly intones, "Bad, bad boy." He is introjecting the value judgment of another, taking it as his own. He has deserted the wisdom of his organism, giving up the locus of evaluation, and is trying to behave in terms of values set by another, in order to hold love. Carl Rogers is not arguing that we all should be allowed to pull our baby sister's hair. Shame is just one of hundreds of possible options in situations like this. It just happens to be the preferred option for most parents, since it allows their values to become more prominent in our minds.
This process is accelerated when we get to school. Since we still need and want love, our teachers use this as a weapon to control us. When we do what they want they reward us and give us their approval. When we don't, they punish us and take away their love. This can be done through disapproval, humiliation, or by simply ignoring us. No matter how they do it, we get the message loud and clear.
We are also being trained by our peers. For many of us this is even worse than what we get in our homes and classrooms. In any oppressive environment, the oppressed are likely to turn on themselves and set up their own hierarchies. In most schools this means that the cool, tough, and popular students train everyone else to act in certain ways. One of the consequences of this is that most of us are trained to hide any sign of weakness from our peers and even to a large extent, our friends.
What does all this conditional love and approval do to us? First of all, we become self-conscious. We have to constantly worry about how we appear to other people in fear that we might lose their love and approval. This forces us to lie to others and put on masks. Letting people see our true selves becomes too risky. We even start to despise our true selves and push them away. Our inner wisdom is cut off, and we begin to live at the mercy of outside forces.
Have you seen those electronic collars that some dogs have to wear? Every time the dog goes out of the yard it gets electrocuted. The dog quickly learns not to cross the invisible boundary set by its owner. Eventually the dog learns this lesson so well that the owner can take the collar off. Same thing happens with us. We are trained by our parents, our peers, and our teachers to travel along narrow paths set by them, and then when we are finally released from their control we keep traveling those narrow paths.
We don't have to accept that future. We can decide to explore the life that is outside those paths. We can decide to throw away our introjected values and begin to listen to ourselves again.
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The unlearning process is simple to describe. We were trained by the use of conditional love; therefore our untraining will involve unconditional love. Let me describe what this means for me.
First, when I notice myself pushing some emotion away, I reverse course and try to feel and accept it as fully as I can. This is both painful and nourishing. This only works, though, if I notice the feeling before I automatically banish it from consciousness. Therefore mindfulness is needed. Mindfulness is a state of active, open, non-judgemental attention on the present. When I am mindful, I notice scary feelings arise in me while also noticing the urge to flee them, argue with them, or push them way. Then I lovingly embrace everything that flows through me.
Second, when I realize that I haven't been mindful, I go back and relive the banished emotion. For example, when I experience boredom, my automatic reaction is to quickly find something to do. Only after I find myself looking up baseball stats on players I don't know or care about, do I realize that I am partaking in an unrewarding activity in order to avoid feeling empty inside. Then I go back and try to experience that feeling of emptiness.
Third, I search for people who will love me unconditionally. This is difficult because I'm normally so scared of rejection that it is hard to even give someone a chance to love me unconditionally. Therefore I rarely do this, but when I do, the payoff is tremendous. When someone accepts me fully, it makes me think, "Maybe there is nothing wrong with me after all."
Fourth, I read books with loving and empathetic authors. Carl Rogers is one such author. I always feel safe and valued when I read his writings, especially his book, On Becoming a Person. Below is a relevant excerpt.
I feel that over the years I have learned to become more adequate in listening to myself; so that I know, somewhat more adequately than I used to, what I am feeling at any given moment--to be able to realize I am angry, or that I do feel rejecting toward this person; or that I feel very full of warmth and affection for this individual; or that I am bored and uninterested in what is going on; or that I am eager to understand this individual or that I am anxious and fearful in my relationship to this person. All of these diverse attitudes are feelings which I think I can listen to in myself. One way of putting this is that I feel I have become more adequate in letting myself be what I am. It becomes easier for me to accept myself as a decidedly imperfect person, who by no means functions at all times in the way in which I would like to function.
This must seem to some like a very strange direction in which to move. It seems to me to have value because the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. I believe that I have learned this from my clients as well as within my own experience--that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.
Fifth, I stop trying to get love from people who will only love me conditionally. This means I don't go after friends who might like my facade, but not the real person underneath. It also means that I stop trying to get approval from authority figures since they only approve of me when I do what they want.
Sixth, I enjoy nature. For me, nature is a place of refuge, where I can feel safe enough to put down my defenses for a while. It is a place where I can feel at peace with the world. And when I am back in society and my defenses are up again, I can remember that feeling of peace and build strength from it.
~Anonymous
Unschooling Quotes All quotes come from Growing without Schooling with permission of HoltGWS LLC.
When an adult comes up and asks, "Why aren't you in school?" you're supposed to soften it by saying, "My mom (or dad) teaches me at home." If you say, "I don't even go to school. So far, I've taught myself everything I want to know," they think you've run away from school or are a lunatic. Whereas the other way, they think your parent's a teacher and you get private lessons. The usual adult person in America thinks it's terribly hard to teach yourself something, and if you want to learn something, you've got to find somebody to teach it to you. This leads to the idea that kids are dumb unless taught or unless they go to school. GWS #73
What do [my teenagers] do all day? Why is it that I don't know? Why is it that I don't care? We don't keep journals or go on field trips or categorize the day's activities into subject areas. I can't stand the dead smell of all those fakey thought-up things. GWS #35
I dropped out of high school when I was fifteen and in the ninth grade. My mom and her boyfriend made it legally possible by turning our home into a private school. It's great. They've been providing me with resource materials and three years later I've become interested in subjects I would have shrieked about if I was still in high school. I'm writing science fiction stories, reading physics, and most importantly I've learned how to think for myself and make my own decisions. Basically, the freedom I lacked in school has enabled me to grow up. GWS #52
What amazes me is that these are not "gifted" children-they spend most of their time doing what they want to do (after chores, that is). In the winter we do structured studies for a couple of hours each morning but that's about it. Most of their learning is completely spontaneous. As I write, Maggie and Britt stopped by the orchard (where I'm typing) to tell me they are going off to the woods to look for a doe Britt spotted this morning and to spot birds and record their calls on paper... I could go on and on about my average kids and their wonderful growth. It seems they have simply more time to grow and develop than other children I know who have probably more potential but so much less time to realize it because they are always stuck away in a school building. GWS #35
I was angry at the way [schoolwork and classes] were intruding on my life. I hated them bitterly, and sometimes felt that I just couldn't keep it up... I read and reread some of the writers who articulated feelings I have had about schooling, like John Holt and James Herndon. And I heard echoes of many a summer's end: walking into a bookstore or a library as if it were a candy store, glancing longingly at all the books I wanted to read, and knowing that school would take up all the time instead. GWS #109
I believe that schools should not constantly test and measure us in order to rank us. By doing so, they teach us to believe that we can be tested and measured, or at least that everything important about us can be measured and the rest must not be important. The SAT might measure technical intelligence well. However, tests like the SAT can't measure important intelligence, like our insightful knowledge or our sense of wonder. GWS #106
Two things made those [high school] years bearable. First, literature. I'd play sick every chance I could so I could stay home and read. Or I'd play hooky and hide out all day in the county library. (Bless those librarians. They never reported me, though they must have realized that I was truant from school.) I read widely and wildly, whatever captured my interest, without direction or guidance. When I happened upon "The Waste Land," there was nobody to tell me what it was supposed to be about, how I was supposed to evaluate it, or that it was supposed to be very difficult. So I read all of T.S. Eliot's notes on the poem, then half a dozen critical studies, then a bunch of stuff on the Grail legend, and drew my own conclusions. GWS #66
I'm considering the possibility that it might be useful to me someday to have that piece of paper that says I have been through college and that it would make my family feel more comfortable about my choices. I may hold out on moral grounds, though; one way to delegitimize unfair and ridiculous credentialing systems is to boycott them, and the reverse is also true-taking part in them lends them your tacit support. GWS #109
Despite the freedom that I have now, I feel limited by my past. I spent a total of 86 months in public schools, attending for at least part of every grade but seventh. There are still two years before I would graduate, but I don't plan to go back. I am angry with society for the time they made me waste. I wish I could have the time back again, and learn the way I feel I should have.
Near the end of the day, the hallways empty as the kids leave early to go to the beach. They have to come back tomorrow, and I don't. I don't have to get up at five to catch a bus at quarter to seven. I don't have to stay up 'til one studying for a test on something I don't care about, don't need, and am going to forget the minute the bell rings. I will not have to struggle with locks that the school is allowed to open anyway, fight my way through throngs of kids who once spent hours learning how to walk quietly in line, eat a sixty-cent lunch not fit to feed to pets, let alone growing teenagers and children. I won't be fighting for space in a tiny mirror mounted on a graffiti-plastered wall in the girls' room, where the door has been taken off the hinges to expose any tell-tale cigarettes. I won't be sleeping through classes where I am supposed to be learning math, doodling through classes where I am supposed to be learning history, or daydreaming through classes where I am supposed to be learning French.
I'll be sitting at home reading a book. Since I am not in school, perhaps I will learn something. GWS #65
[My daughter] wouldn't let me tutor her and she wouldn't do all the educational things I had planned, like go to museums and stuff. She hung around in her bathrobe and drew pictures all day. For nearly three years. Summers, too.
Well, you should see her art work today. Fantastic! GWS #32
Over the years I've had a few long phone calls from parents who are concerned about the lack of academic interest shown by one of their children. Among other things that cause them worry is the fact that the child will show an interest in something and the parent will arrange for a chance to follow up on it-lessons, a visit-and shortly thereafter the child loses interest.
Somewhere in these conversations I've said something like: how would you feel if someone older than you-say your mother, or mother-in-law-lived with you now and always worried about whether you were OK, whether you read too little or too much, and whether she should do something to fix you up? Suppose she got upset because you signed up for a course somewhere and then dropped out? Suppose she made you continue? The parents laugh ruefully in recognition. "That would be awful. I'm always signing up for things and dropping out," they say.
There are many good reasons for dropping out of an adult education class-the brief exposure was enough to satisfy one's curiosity, something about the teacher turns one off, one has less time than one expected because of other changes in one's life. Aren't we lucky that, as adults, we can quit? Nobody tells us we have to finish what we begin, or worries about what that says about us. So maybe it's reasonable to extend that same privilege to our children. GWS #52
For me, there's a way in which my daughters' liberty from school and its constraints taught me how to be free, too, and gave me the permission to take risks I hadn't taken before. Starting New Moon was a big risk for us. Both Nancy (my wife) and I worked in management positions at established organizations, and were finally making decent salaries after years of living in poverty. Somehow, despite this, we took the risk of following a dream. Although it wasn't conscious at the time, I'm not sure we would have taken that risk if we hadn't been unschooling for several years. By experiencing how unschooling worked for the girls, it was possible for us to say, "We can do that too. Like the girls, we can follow our own interests and passions where they take us. We can stay home and enjoy each other's company and do something worthwhile together." And that's what we did! Just one more way unschooling has radically changed our lives. GWS #113
I am a Sophomore at Wellesley College. I started to write and call colleges in what would have been my sophomore year in high school. In the beginning of my senior year I decided to apply to three women's colleges: Converse, Hollins, and Wellesley. I was admitted to all three. All of these schools were interested in homeschooling. Hollins and Converse didn't know much about homeschoolers but Wellesley had had several apply each year for a while and knew what to expect.
Aside from the usual applications, I sent lists of books that I had read, my music repertoire, poetry I had memorized, books that I had written over the past four years, activities that I had participated in that I would not have been able to had I gone to regular school (a stained glass apprenticeship, an archaeological dig, the Florida State University bands and orchestras, etc.), a tape of me playing the harp, and pictures of the quilts I had made. In addition to regular essays I submitted articles I had written for a high school newspaper and GWS about homeschoolers and what being a homeschooler meant to me. My harp teacher, professors at FSU, and my high school physics teacher (I took a class at the high school) wrote letters of recommendation. The Wellesley admissions department says that these kinds of letters are very important for homeschoolers because they help the admissions board decide if the student will be able to do well at the college. GWS #96
Because of the flexibility of my schedule, at an early age I was able to volunteer at a local museum, one of the most exciting and valuable experiences I have ever had. In addition to its being simply a fun experience, I was able to parlay this early experience into more jobs during my high school [homeschooled] and college years in libraries, museums, and archives. Because of this experience, when I applied for the position I now hold, as Assistant Registrar and Curator of Photographs at the Maryland State Archives, I found that all those jobs I had had since I was fourteen added up to four and a half years of fulltime experience in my field-more than enough experience to exempt me from the M.A. requirement for my position! GWS #118
Seth did an interesting thing recently. He became interested in cycling and joined a bike club last spring. He's the youngest member by far. He trained for a race and did well last spring, goes on long rides with them (25-70 miles, 100 this Sunday), bought some needed equipment... This was getting expensive for him, so he made a deal with the owner of a local bike shop to work out purchase of things at cost. He won a summer race and came in third out of fifty (some experienced racers) a week ago. He reads biking magazines and books and plans his training and strategy. GWS #43
The most important thing I want to impress upon people about our family school is this: WE NEVER TAUGHT ANYTHING. My husband refused to allow it. The closest I came to "teaching" our four sons was during the evening reading-aloud session. We've waded, mulled, or stormed through the Old Testament, War and Peace, and Moby Dick, among many, many other classics. It was never required to come and listen, and one of our sons gave it up, preferring to read to himself. We provided for and supported the boys-never taught them. Their studies grew out of their own interests. They used all the local libraries and we sent for books from the state library. At one time, they spent months just fixing up an old fishing boat. We never really know what they were learning! My husband says we won't know the success or failure of our home schooling for a very long time, if ever. We always said they'd "graduate" from the home school when the direction of their lives was outward from home. And that is what has happened. GWS #35
I had been a schoolteacher before I began homeschooling. In school, I and other teachers knew that there were kids who could do the work but couldn't perform well on the test, and kids who got a high score on the test but didn't remember any of the material afterwards. I had been one of those kids myself, and I think doing well on tests gave me a false sense of self-worth, because although I did well on tests, I didn't magically have an understanding of what I could do or wanted to do, and when I graduated I remember feeling like a phony. Also, when I was a student, I remember that there were some kids in the class who clearly had a real grasp of the material, they really connected with it, but they didn't do as well on the tests . . . In some way, I learned that truly understanding the material wasn't necessarily the best thing. . . When I began homeschooling . . . I didn't like the idea of [my children] judging themselves, or limiting themselves, according to what the test said. GWS #100
Things finally got so bad this year in eleventh grade that I said, "That's it-I'm not going back to school anymore," and I didn't. I had a few months of recuperation, which meant doing whatever I felt like doing, be it baking, reading, cutting recipes, or watching a movie. I had a lot of guilt feelings during that time about not being in school, but fortunately I have wonderful parents who reassured me that what I had done was OK. GWS #80
I'm fourteen. I've never been to school (except one day with my cousin). I have been trading with neighbors for two years. I trade babysitting, washing dishes, and money for lessons. I have four lessons a week: sewing, weaving, botany, and piano. It works great if you have friendly neighbors. GWS #32
Lora only read what she was forced to read when she was in school, and I would sometimes coerce her by reading one chapter out loud to her and then having her read the next to me. All of a sudden, during the summer between school and homeschool, she became an avid reader... I don't know how many books she read that summer, but I was amazed-it was as if now that she didn't have to, and she was free, she wanted to read. She has read over sixty books in each nine months of homeschooling. If we did nothing else these two years, I consider that a major accomplishment. GWS #76
Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see in families who have homeschooled their children from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life . . . Most children are very hurt and angry about what has happened to them and to their peers in school. As long as they stay in school that anger must remain under control. When they come home, it all begins to come out. It may show up in extreme highs and lows, negative emotional outbursts, or long periods of apparent depression. GWS #76
A change that pleases me very much this year was to watch our son Steve (twelve), who spent four years in public school, and who spent his first year of homeschooling asking for "assignments," become a more self-motivated learner. He became interested in mechanical drawing when I gave him a beginning drafting set and he spends a lot of time designing cars and space ships. He has discovered science fiction and reads Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and others with great enjoyment (he has always read a lot, but despises the school-type reading programs where one must answer questions to prove comprehension). We both enrolled in the IBM Systems computer course at the state Vo-Tech school and he thoroughly enjoyed that-the perfect classroom situation, in my opinion, no tests, no grades, just people voluntarily coming to learn about something which they were interested in, from a helpful expert in the field. Since Steve's career goals tend toward the technical at this point, he works real hard at mathematics, and at his request we added the Key Curriculum algebra and geometry series to his regular sixth grade math. He surprised me this year by informing me that he didn't want to take a summer break from his schoolwork! GWS #45
I still didn't know what to expect, or what I would want to do with the time, because back then I wasn't interested in much of anything. We decided to start homeschooling on the day that school started, and it should have been like any other day, except we didn't know what to expect of one another. We didn't know what mom was going to do, if mom was going to assign lots of stuff. My attitude was still so rebellious. I was so fed up with school that I felt I didn't want to learn anything. There was so much tension that first week.
The change was very gradual. Your whole thinking changes. In school, everything's programmed for you, this is how you have to think, and then all of a sudden you're on your own, and you don't know what you want to do. It was so hard at the beginning, but I knew there was no way I would go back to school, and I think we all knew it would get better if we stuck it out. GWS #64
When we took the children out of school nearly two years ago, we had advice from several people, among them Dr. Pat Montgomery [director of the Clonlara Home Based Education Program], She told us if we would let the children follow their own interests, and just help them when they needed help, they would learn more than if we put them on a pre-planned curriculum.
I respected Dr. Montgomery, and was grateful for her help. But I just couldn't see any glimmer of hope in Becky [fourteen]. It seemed that seven years of public school had successfully stamped out any inclination she might have had to learn. By her own admission, she had learned to cram for tests, make A's and B's on her report cards, and promptly forget almost everything she had "learned." Whenever I allowed her free rein on "school," her one interest was mindless fiction-nothing of any value that I could see. Pat tried to encourage me, but I had the misgivings and insecurities that I see in so many other parents new to home-schooling. I was afraid Becky would learn nothing at all. So-we embarked on a "curriculum." It turned out to be just a duplication of the old public school pattern. So I went pretty easy with it, still allowing her freedom, and limiting her fiction reading to what I felt was least objectionable.
But, Pat was right. It finally happened. This year Becky progressed from Louis L'Amour Western fiction to an interest in Western history, then to the history of the United States, and is now in the process of memorizing the Constitution word for word. GWS #28
I started by sending a questionnaire to all the families listed on the mailing list of our group, Unschoolers Support. I asked them to list things they'd like to learn, teach, share, or exchange. Now we have Connections, a list of people from all over Connecticut who want to share their knowledge, ideas, goods, services, activities. A crucial difference between Connections and school is the matter of choice. In Connections, whatever is learned is at the learner's request. It's a voluntary arrangement. We list what is being offered and what is being sought, and then it's up to each person to use our mailing list to contact someone. People then make their own arrangements about time and place to meet, methods to use, compensation, etc. I don't take responsibility for anything beyond listing the names, and I made that clear both because I didn't want to be in an administrative position and because I believe people can be responsible for whatever they choose to do. That means that I can't guarantee that anyone who is offering to teach something will indeed be a good teacher. That's up to the learner to figure out. GWS #113
I wanted to continue taking Latin with my wonderful high school Latin teacher. I also wanted to be free to take an elective or two at the school if I ended up choosing to. The school administrators seemed to think I was crazy for believing I could get a better education outside of their prestigious school than in it. Even worse, I had the further audacity to assume that the school people would agree to be an academic side dish to my educational feast. As it has happened, I have been taking Latin all year without the school's official permission, although they do know I'm doing it. It wasn't until March that we made any sort of headway in communicating with the administrators. I've learned that clear, straightforward persistence is the best way to go. I've also found that talking to a lot of the teachers around the school instead of to the administrators is the best way of drawing support... I now take both the Latin class and a public speaking class at the high school. GWS #105
Steve, thirteen, developed a strong interest in freshwater fish. Aside from actually going fishing, which is his very favorite thing to do, he managed to read every available book in the library, including five volumes of a fish encyclopedia. He worked out a deal with a friend who is a graduate student in fisheries, to supply him with worms and perch fillets for his specimens. In return, Steve received a large, fully-equipped aquarium, in which to keep his own specimens. A highlight of the year was when he got to "seine" a local river (drag the river with huge nets to bring up small fish to study) with the curator of the University Life Sciences Museum. Next week, he starts an apprenticeship with the ranger at a nearby lake (who happens to be one of the most knowledgeable naturalists around). He will be learning, among other things, how to manage a camping and fishing facility. This interest in fish led into many other areas, as a real interest always does-climate, pond and stream ecology, life cycles of insects, etc.
My older children continually reinforce my belief that when a child has an interest in something, they have a real need to plunge much deeper into the subject than a normal school curriculum ever allows. GWS #53
For our first session, I brought in some books by Raymond Smullyan (The Lady Or The Tiger and What is the Name of This Book?) consisting of all sorts of logic puzzles. These books are about as far away from math textbooks as you can get. They are chock full of amusing puzzles-pure mathematical candy. The puzzles are not meant to illustrate important mathematical principles; they are simply fun. But they are incredibly rich, mathematically speaking. The puzzles escalate in difficulty as the book progresses, and solving them requires careful, rigorous, systematic thinking-in other words, mathematical thinking...
I hope [the unschoolers] came to see mathematics less as the sort of necessary baggage school people say one ought to carry around and more as a way of looking at and exploring the amazing variety of patterns in the world around them, as an experience that can be as fun, as fulfilling, and as beautiful as art, drama, or music. GWS #107
A lot of people don't know how many options are open to them, and we thought that if we all talked to each other about what we were doing with our lives, each of us could make our own lives more exciting as we learned about our opportunities. Another goal we had was to spread the word about unschooling, because it's a very misunderstood concept. GWS #112
[Emily] sent out a survey to the group, listing some topics that she thought were interesting, and asking for feedback. Every September the group gets together for a business meeting, and at that meeting last fall they brainstormed a list of things that they wanted to study but didn't feel they could easily study on their own and would enjoy studying with a group. Many people mentioned foreign language, but they wanted different languages, so that wouldn't work well. The two other topics that emerged were science and the arts. So that led us to organize a fifteen-session biology program, and then we had a ceramics program at a century-old historic pottery in this area...
There are about forty kids in the group all together, and they come from within about an hour's drive of Detroit. Of course, not everyone participates in every activity. Some activities have to be limited in size, and not everyone is interested in every activity anyway. Sometimes we only get three or four people, and that can be fun, too. A lot of friendships have grown among kids in the group. Emily now feels that she has a good group of pals. She has made it a point, in all the flyers she sends out, to say that this is a nonsectarian group, that we don't favor any one philosophy, in order to welcome all homeschoolers. Consequently, the group is really a mixture of people-we have people homeschooling for religious reasons, people homeschooling for academic or other philosophical reasons. The group has become racially integrated, too, which we're very grateful for. The kids are meeting people from many different backgrounds, with many different kinds of life experiences, and the friendships really cross those lines. GWS #94
When all my friends were trying to decide what they were going to do after high school, I started doing the same thing. Among my friends, there seemed to be three choices going around: go to college, get a job, or join the military. I decided that the military wasn't for me. I thought about college, but decided that this wasn't the right time for me. Looking at where I wanted to go and what kind of career I might want, and thinking of all the people I've heard about who changed their jobs halfway through their lives to do what they always wanted to do, I decided that if I want to do something that takes a college degree, I can get one later.
So I looked at what I wanted to do with my life now and I decided the answer was travel. That is when I conceived my plan to see America. .. Different lifestyles, cultures, and ways of doing things interest me.
I have a good friend in Massachusetts who I met through GWS. In the summer of 1987 I went up to her farm for a week and became a part of her family. She taught me about taking care of her horses and I helped out, including cooking, and I went with her to various community activities. After that visit I went up two more times. Five days after I got my driver's license, I started on a two-week driving trip to Massachusetts and back. That's the kind of thing I'd like to do with other families across the country, to come in and live as a useful member of the family. GWS #74
I am friends with the adults who live in the house next door to u s . . . Dick is interested in bicycling and philosophy and Crunch is interested in word games, movies, and sports. These are all things that I am interested in, which is one of the reasons I immediately became friends with them. The other reason is that they take me seriously and respect what I have to say about things. There are a few things that I talk to them about that I don't talk to most of my friends about who are closer in age to me (I'm thirteen) -for instance, politics and education.
I don't think my friendship with them is very different from my friendships with other teenagers, except for the fact that we have better conversations. We often fool around with each other the way I would with friends my age. I think there are many things that I can learn from them, but that doesn't make me feel that they are necessarily superior to me. There are probably things that they can learn from me also. I do think that we have a very equal friendship, most likely because they respect me in the same way that I respect them. GWS #74
We have been very active this year in the peace movement, and this has provided the older boys with a very direct type of learning in the area of "social studies." We have constructed a section of the Peace Ribbon, regularly met with and written to our representatives (they were quite thrilled to get their first correspondence from their Congressmen), viewed numerous films and attended lectures on Central America, and met priests, nuns, and refugees for some first-hand information about U.S. involvement in Latin America. Because of these experiences, they follow the news and current events with great interest, enjoy reading about the geography and history of Central America, and even practice their Spanish. GWS #45
We almost always start new experiences as experiments. That helps us define more clearly what we want and what parts of the current arrangement are on target... Though many of our short-term experiments have ended up lasting much longer, proposing the idea as short-term makes it easier for the adult to say yes...
We look for people actively involved in their area of interest. We look for an artist, not an art teacher, a Spanish-speaking person, not a Spanish teacher, a wood worker, not a shop teacher, a chemist, not a chemistry teacher. (Of course, sometimes these are one and the same.) Second, we look for people who see themselves as learners. Generally, if someone believes that he has a complete body of knowledge, he tends to be less enthusiastic and more rigid about how he shares his information. On the other hand, people who view themselves as just further along the spectrum of learning about their subject will share not only their expertise but also their own challenges and confusions... GWS #112
Besides my dad, there are three people in particular who have helped me learn more about computers. First, Mr. Warner was my 4-H Club instructor. He taught me the most commonly used BASIC words. He explained what the commands "PRINT," "GOTO," and "INPUT" meant. Also, he taught me about flow charts. Knowing about flow charts helped me to write my own programs. He also introduced me to some new programs. Before I met Mr. Warner I knew nothing about computers; I am very glad that I met him through 4-H.
Second, Mrs. Perm is a computer instructor at a school. She goes to the same church as I do. When she found out that I was interested in computers, she invited me to work on them with her. Almost every Sunday after church I go over to the school with her and work with the computers in the classroom. I play computer games and write programs. I enjoy these Sundays very much. Mrs. Perm has also lent me books about computers. Through her, I have gained more appreciation for what computers can do. I am happy that she takes the time to allow me to work with her.
When I first got my own computer, I didn't know how to work any of the software. I found out that one of the dads in my YMCA Trailblazer group, Dr. Loader, had the same computer and printer as I did. He offered to help me figure out some of the software. I had a lot of questions about word processing programs in particular. Dr. Loader happened to have a word processing program that was easy to use and he copied it for me. He also spent a lot of time answering questions for me over the phone-and in the beginning I had a lot of questions! He invited me over to his office so that he could better explain how the programs worked. Once he even came over to my house on his lunch hour to help me print a file. I'm really grateful for all the time he has given to me.
I'm really fortunate to have all of these friends who know about computers and are willing to help me. GWS #14
I found learning Japanese without a teacher or textbook to be both challenging and enjoyable. The key was having the right attitude. This included realizing that learning is sometimes hard work. However, it is fun, it is much easier and has a more lasting effect. It also included looking for every opportunity to use what I was learning. My family hosted at least six Japanese exchange students over the course of eighteen months. Between their visits I reviewed what I had learned and took in some more information from my CD ROM program and my grammar book...
The one thing that helped me the most was talking with someone who is Japanese. It is essential to understand how words were pronounced right away. This helps eliminate a lot of confusion...
I think homeschoolers benefit by sharing what they have learned, so I did just that. I prepared a three-hour hands-on presentation on the Japanese language and culture for homeschoolers in my support group. Some of the things I shared with them were origami, basic Hiragana, introduction to conversational Japanese, some of the gifts we received from our various students, and the Tea Ceremony... Giving this presentation allowed me to review what I had learned about the Japanese and their language. GWS #106
Grant is seventeen now and works as a carpenter while preparing to take his G.E.D. test. Graham, fourteen, has taken a breather from his violin lessons... He does quite a lot of auto repair with my husband, and is becoming very skilled and responsible. At his age, he loves anything to do with cars, and never complains about unloading livestock feed since it involves driving to the barn, backing up, etc., and maybe going once or twice up and down the driveway for good measure. GWS #37
I act a lot in our local community theatre... This past March I was in Brighton Beach Memoirs. I was the only kid under sixteen in the cast. Being with all those adults really gave me a professional feeling. The adults were so serious and fifty kids weren't running around making noise. I felt that the play was more realistic than a bunch of kids on stage standing around waiting to say their lines. When I am in a play with other kids I want to hang around and play with the other kids and not really watch the play and pay attention. That is nice too, but I don't feel professional. GWS #68
Unschooling Quotes
(I found most of these in The Teenage Liberation Handbook; others were found elsewhere.) "I recognize June by the flowers, now. I used to know it by review tests, and restlessness." -Lisa Asher, unschooled teen
"We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself." -George Bernard Shaw
"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school." -George Bernard Shaw
"The only thing I didn't do in school was learn." -unschooler Jason Lescalleet
"The Indian schools were like jails and run along military lines, with roll call four times a day...The schools are better now than they were in my time. They look good on the outside. More modern and expensive. The teachers understand the kids a little better, use more psychology and less stick. But in these fine new buildings Indian children still commit suicide, because they are lonely among all that noise and activity. I know of a ten-year-old girl who hanged herself...When we enter the school we at least know that we are Indians. We come out half red and half white, not knowing what we are." -Lame Deer, Lakota Medicine Man
"I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught." -Winston Churchill
"I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony." -Winston Churchill
"How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude." -Winston Churchill
"Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other in both mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day in the theatre to applaud 'Hernani'." -Robert Louis Stevenson
"School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense amd common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not." -H. L. Mencken
"Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it." -Madeleine L'Engle
"The schools ain't what they used to be and never was." -Will Rogers
"Education with inert ideas is not only useless, it is above all things harmful." -A. N. Whitehead
"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." -George Santayana
"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts." -Henry Adams
"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you." -John Updike
"We're drowning in information and starving for knowledge." -Rutherford Rogers
"Every day I went to school was a constant attack on my self-worth. I learned not to believe in myself. It was a bombardment from all directions; the teachers were saying how bad I was doing in their classes, my family was ashamed of my grades, and the students were attacking me about everything under the sun! I was like a plant trying to grow in darkness--it doesn't. It all left me afraid to dream my dreams-afraid to be my true self! Who wants to show their true self if they're just going to get a rock hurled at it?! The real question is: how do we undo the damage done? We have to take time to dream again, not other peoples', but our own precious dreams that mean everything to us. Our dreams are our life maps." -unschooler Jenny Smith
"Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see from families who have homeschooled their kids from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life." -Judy Garvey in GWS #76
"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school." -Saki (H.H. Munro)
"You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself." -Galileo
"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be." -Albert Einstein
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
"It is... nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." -Albert Einstein
"When was the last time you saw a tombstone with SAT scores inscribed on it?" -Edward B. Fiske
"The child who attends public school typically spends approximately 1,100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these -- 220 -- are spent, as the educators say, 'on task'. Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent, are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters." -Homeschooling For Excellence
"Most people, most of the time, learn most of what they know about science and technology outside of school." -National Science Foundation
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school." -Margaret Mead
"I hate, loathe and despise schools....School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way." -Maurice Sendak (author of "Where the Wild Things Are")
"Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside. Most of the information received meant absolutely nothing to me. For example, I was chastised for not being able to remember what states border Nebraska and what are the states of the Gulf Coast. It was simply a matter of memorizing the names, nothing about the process of memorizing or any reason to memorize. Education without either meaning or excitement is impossible. I longed for the outdoors, leaving only a small part of my conscious self to pay attention to schoolwork.
"One day as I sat fidgeting in class the whole situation suddenly appeared very ridiculous to me. I burst into raucous peals of uncontrolled laughter, I could not stop. The class was first amused, then scared. I stood up, pointed at the teacher, and shrieked my scorn, hardly taking breath in between my howling paroxysms." -Ansel Adams (who dropped out of school at age twelve and began taking photographs)
"Oh, yes, I went to the white man's schools. I learned to read from schoolbooks, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on man-made pages. I turn to the Great Spirit's book which is the whole of his creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. You know, if you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit had provided you and me with an opportunity for study in nature's university, the forest, the rivers, the mountains, and the animals, which include us." -Tatanga Mani, Stoney Indian
A letter from Native Americans to settlers, dated 1774:
We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen to not be the same with yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences, but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, ...neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Councellors, they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer, tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men out of them.
"I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone." -Woody Allen
"As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality." -Franz Kafka
"I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water." -Claude Monet
"It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry." -John Taylor Gatto
"The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders." -John Taylor Gatto
"Public school--where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression." -Emma Goldman
"There can be no education without leisure; and without leisure, education is worthless." -Sarah Josepha Hale
"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner." -Aleister Crowley
"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training." -Anna Freud
"If the student fails to learn, the teacher fails to teach." -unknown
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." -Oscar Wilde
"How is it that little children are so intelligent while men are so stupid? It must be education that does it." -Alexandre Dumas, fils
"Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing." -Ilya Ehrenburg
"Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be 'socialized.'" -Robert Lindner
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." -Plato
"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." -Mark Twain
"It is easier for a teacher to command than to teach." -John Locke
"An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear." -Nietzsche
"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught." -Vauvenargues
"The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron." -Horace Mann
"Why have kids just to get rid of them? I'm opposed to the whole nonsense." -Gomez Addams, on the original "Addams Family" show.
"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college." -Lillian Smith
"I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma." -L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
"Love goes towards love as schoolboys from their books; Love from love, toward school with heavy looks." -Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, 2:2:156
"School is like a lollipop. It sucks until it is gone." -Ashley Salvati
"How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?" -Henry D. Thoreau
"The more I think about it the more I think high school is seriously warped." -J.S. Feliciano, Pump up the Volume
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." -Paul Simon
"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is." -Isaac Asimov
"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." -Grace Llewellyn
"It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young." -Bertrand Russell
"We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. Hey teacher, leave the kids alone." -Pink Floyd
"N is for Neville, who died of ennui." -Edward Gorey, Gashlycrumb Tinies
"Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how." -John Holt
~http://www.nyctophilia.net/unschool/quotes.html