Quotes

"A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing." — John Holt

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards—gold stars, or papers marked 100, or A's on report cards—in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else." — John Holt

"Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons' experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives." — John Holt, Instead of Education

The simple fact is that children are not committed to democratic principles, or political freedom, or the bill of rights, because they themselves do not experience any of these lofty matters in their everyday lives, and in particular, in their schools. Make our schools democratic, give our children freedom of choice and the basic rights of citizenship in the schools, and they will have no problem understanding what this country is about." — Daniel Greenberg, Education in America

"Why is it that people persist in thinking that the solution to real-life problems is talking about them? Does anyone really believe that subjecting children to yet another course will achieve really meaningful goals?" — Daniel Greenberg, Education in America

“Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” — Ivan Illich

"The pupil is 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new." — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

"School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence." — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

"A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; make it possible for all who want to share knowledge to find those who want to learn it from them; and furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known." — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

"Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It's not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential... A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty." — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

"Self-education through play and exploration requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time—time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures. That time is needed to make friends, play with ideas and materials, experience and overcome boredom, learn from one's own mistakes, and develop passions." — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

"We have forgotten that children are designed by nature to learn through self-directed play and exploration, and so, more and more, we deprive them of freedom to learn, subjecting them instead to the tedious and painfully slow learning methods devised by those who run the schools." — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

“Adult direction leads to the assumption that rules are determined by an outside authority and thus not to be questioned. When children play just among themselves, however, they come to realize that rules are merely conventions, established to make the game more fun and more fair, and can be changed to meet changing conditions. For life in a democracy, few lessons are more valuable.” — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

“Sadly, in many cases, the assumption that children are incompetent, irresponsible, and in need of constant direction and supervision becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The children themselves become convinced of their incompetence and irresponsibility, and may act accordingly. The surest way to foster any trait in a person is to treat that person as if he or she already has it.” — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

“Perhaps play would be more respected if we called it something like ‘self-motivated practice of life skills,’ but that would remove the lightheartedness from it and thereby reduce its effectiveness. So we are stuck with the paradox. We must accept play’s triviality in order to realize its profundity.” — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

"The whole purpose of childhood is to learn how to be independent. If you're never allowed experience being independent, you're not going to learn how to be an adult." — Peter Gray

"School suppresses curiosity. School suppresses play. There's no way that you can have a classroom of 20 or 30 kids or more and everybody's gonna be curious about the same thing at the same time." — Peter Gray