Sharing Wisdom

"Disobedience is not an issue if obedience is not the goal."  Daron Quinlan
"The way kids learn to make good decisions is by making decisions, not by following directions."  Alfie Kohn 

John Holt, Father of "Unschooling," a leading figure in school reform, writer, educator, lecturer and author of over ten books, including How Children Fail, How Children Learn, Never Too Late and Teach Your Own.


"Real learning is a process of discovery, and if we want it to happen, we must create the kinds of conditions in which discoveries are made.  We know what these are.  They include time, leisure, freedom and lack of pressure."
"Learning is not the product of teaching.  Learners make learning.  Learners create learning.  The reason that this has been forgotten is that the activity of learning has been made into a product called 'education,' just as the activity, the discipline, of caring for one's health has become the product of 'medical care,' and the activity of inquiring into the world has become the product of 'science,' a specialized thing presumably done only by people with billions of dollars of complicated apparatus.  But health is not a product and science is something you and I do every day of our lives."
"All [of our assumptions about learning] are wrong.  If you start from Chicago to go to Boston, and you think that Boston is due west of Chicago, the farther you go, the worse off you will be. The easily observable fact is that children are passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of the world around them, are extremely good at it, and do it as scientists do, by creating knowledge out of experience.  Children observe, wonder, find, or make and then test the answers to the questions they ask themselves.  When they are not actually prevented from doing these things, they continue to do them and to get better and better at it.  They are observing, thinking, speculating, theorizing, testing, and experimenting - all the time - and they're much better at it than we are.  The idea, the very idea, that we can teach small children how to learn has come to me to seem utterly absurd."                            
~ From the book, Learning All the Time:  How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world without being taught.  by John Holt

"Teacher" Tom Hobson, teacher at Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, WA

"Without fun, we learn nothing but harsh lessons. It's fun to satisfy our intellectual, emotional, and physical curiosities, in fact that's the only way we can do it. Fun is real. Fun is not frivolous, it's central. Fun is the most valuable thing there is. I'm here to tell you, if it's not fun, you're not doing it right."
"Rewards and punishments may appear to work in the moment -- the promise of ice cream may well motivate a child to eat a few peas; the threat of having toys taken away may well motivate a child to tidy up -- but human nature dictates that, being unnatural consequences, the value of the rewards and the severity of the punishments must be regularly increased or they lose their effectiveness. Not only that, but the lessons taught in the long run, to be motivated by the approval or disapproval of others, are certainly not what we wish for our children. Values must come from within; they are not imposed from without: that's called obedience; an unsavory and even dangerous trait." 
"I have no patience for people who justify their authoritarian approach to children by arguing that it works. If I'm bigger and stronger than you, if I have more power than you, if I have more money than you, I can use that strength, power or money to force you into doing my bidding no matter how hard you fight back. Of course it works if the goal is mere obedience. It's a lazy, short-term, adversarial approach, one that will ultimately backfire, but sure, in the immediate moment threats and violence shut the kid up and make him submissive.
What children learn from authoritarian parenting and teaching is that might makes right. What they learn is to follow leaders, not because they are doing something great, but because they can punish you if you don't. What they learn is that someone else is responsible for their behavior and decisions, that the powerful know best, and that knowing 'their place' is their highest calling."
"We may not be "in charge" of our children, but we do use our superior experience to control their environment. When they are very young we do this by covering electrical outlets, closing doors, removing hazardous objects, and generally providing spaces in which they can freely explore and begin to educate themselves about the world. We do this by being with them, talking with them, making statements of fact about the world: "That is red," "The pillow is soft," "The table is hard." As they start to push those boundaries, rather than scold them for their curiosity, we find ways to expand those boundaries, always striving to set the inner circle in such a way that when they attempt the experiment of stepping beyond it (and they will always attempt to step beyond it, no matter what their age) they will still not be killed or permanently maimed. This is what being child-directed is all about: creating a physical and intellectual space in which children "tell you" when they are ready to expand their experiences; not commanding them, not drilling them, not testing them, but simply narrating, filling their world with facts. "If you fall off that, it will probably hurt," "She's crying because you hit her," "We have to go to the store now to buy food for dinner." Our job, then, is not to "tell" children or "instruct" children, but rather to keep them safe and informed as they explore their world through play, learning as they go everything they need to know, including values and morals.

When we're out in the world, at first we carry them over broken glass, we hold their hands as we cross the street, we pull them away from threatening strangers, because they simply do not have the experience to recognize these manifest dangers. If they are not yet capable of understanding that glass will cut them, that cars will kill them, that the man shouting obscenities at a tree trunk is possibly dangerously unstable, they are also not capable of understanding your commands about them. It is our protecting them from these hazards that are the boundaries we set for them. However, as soon as our children begin to ask questions, to show an interest in the sparkly broken glass, the vroom-vroom of traffic, or the sad spectacle of a mentally ill man living on the streets, that's when they are ready to begin to understand: then we begin to teach, not through obedience, but by again narrating a world of facts and helping them safely explore their world, within the new boundaries we have created.

Some still insist, however, for their own good, exactly because young children are incapable of understanding, we must "train" them to obey our parental commands, to react without question to our words: "Stop!" "Come here!" "Sit there!" much in the way one trains a dog. (I'm sorry that this metaphor offends people, but I stand by its aptness.) If we were preparing our charges for a Hobbesian world, then perhaps they would have a point. If we are preparing children to take jobs in the military or a factory floor or any other institution organized as a pyramid with all the power concentrated at the top, then perhaps we would be doing them a favor. 

This, however, is emphatically not the world for which I'm preparing children. The habits of blind obedience, of trained reactions to the commands of others, flies in the face of our democratic experiment: they are a danger both to the child and ultimately to the rest of us who count on our fellow citizens to be equal and free. Obedience is not a democratic value."
~ Mostly from the post, Why I Teach the Way I Do.  I highly recommend reading the whole post. 

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