“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

– John Taylor Gatto

So many people seem to view parenting as if they are workers on assembly line, trying to churn out a quality product. That envisioned end product would vary from parent to parent I suppose, but at its core it is the same thing: something the PARENT deems worthwhile. They want a child that grows up to be some of version of “successful.” They want good grades, they want an athlete, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. They want to be able to brag about honor rolls and dean’s lists and signing bonuses. And they’ve got them on a conveyor belt long before that! It’s a race to see who can walk first, talk first, read first. Sleep through the night, tie your shoes, do long division. MUST TURN OUT A QUALITY PRODUCT.

Everyone is so concerned with how their children are going to “turn out.” My issues with this are multiple, but among the top few are: Who decides whether or not they turned out well? WHEN do they decide they turned out any way at all? When they’re adults? What’s an adult? 18, 21, 30? What are they until then, ingredients? Are they just a part of a whole, not really a person until they’ve grown up and checked everything off some mystical checklist? Who decides what’s on the checklist, and why would that person be more qualified to do so than the child himself?

I’m not interested in raising cookie-cutter children.

My kids are people now, people deserving of respect, trust, and freedom. I’m not concerned with how they’re going to turn out; I’m concerned with their happiness RIGHT NOW, right in this moment. I want them to know that they’re valued and loved for who they are, not who they may or may not be “someday.” I want them to be joyful, fulfilled, engaged, learning, exploring. I want them to be who they are.

And the future? None of us is guaranteed a future. But if I’m blessed enough to watch all my children grow up? I want them to be happy. I want them to be joyful, fulfilled, engaged, learning, exploring. I want them to be who they are.

My hope for all of my children is that they find what they’re passionate about, and they DO IT, and do it well, no matter what it is. My hope is that they wake up each morning excited for life, and excited to follow their own particular dream. They will decide what path they’ll take, and they will decide what makes them successful. My job is to provide, support, encourage, and get the heck out of their way.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Thanks to all my unschooling e-friends for continually sharing!

“It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”

“Education… now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and fans, driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.”

“True learning-learning that is permanent and useful,that leads to intelligent action and further learning, can arise only out of the experience, interest, and concerns of the learner”

“Standardized testing for children is the equivalent of a gardener pulling his plants up by the root to see if they are growing”

“The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”

“All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

“Education – compulsory schooling, compulsory learning – is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.”

I love John Holt. He and John Taylor Gatto were so hugely instrumental in our path to unschooling. I came across this quote today – one that I have read before – and wanted to share it. So simple and meaningful at the same time. Love it.

Once when John Holt was speaking to a school audience, describing his views on their structured curriculum, a student asked him, “But surely there must be something important enough that everyone should learn it?” He thought for a moment and replied, “To learn to say ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I don’t know’, and ‘I was wrong’.”