Unschooling Conference in London!

I wish we could go--an Unschooling Conference in London on July 25th 2009.

Towards the bottom of their blog and registration form, there are several quotes about unschooling. I'm still in such a homeschooling conference kind of mood, I thought I'd share them with you.

I hope you readers realize that as a homeschooling proponent, specifically Unschooling, I don't wish to disparage other families' choices about their own path. I'm just jazzed about our path and want to promote it and counter any criticism of it--perceived or imagined.

If you or your kids are in public school--great, I hope it works well for you! If you or your kids are in private school--same thing--you have all my good wishes. If you are homeschoolers or unschoolers--partay!

Everyone, enjoy the quotes below:



"Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can (to them); give children as much help and guidance as they ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest." J. Holt from How Children Learn

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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

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We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain

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IT IS, IN FACT, NOTHING short of a miracle that the modern methods of education 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 wrack and ruin without fail. 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. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly. --Albert Einstein

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"I recognize June by the flowers, now. I used to know it by review tests, and restlessness." -Lisa Asher, unschooled teen – from the Teenage Liberation Handbook

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"I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught." -Winston Churchill

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"Most people, most of the time, learn most of what they know about science and technology outside of school." -National Science Foundation

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"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