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. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age. Peter Gray
If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself
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A.S. Neill
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
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William Blake
There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge.
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Christopher Langan
Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities...
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John Holt
This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements, " usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe...
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John Holt
More Quotes By Peter Gray
In this day and age, nobody can learn more than a sliver of all there is to know. Why force everyone to learn the same sliver?
People naturally want to make sense of their world. That, to Greenberg, is the essence of human curiosity. As they strive to answer questions that truly interest them, people are automatically motivated to use any resources that help them to address those questions. But the...
Once compulsory systems of state-run schools were established, they became increasingly standardized, both in content and in method. For the sake of efficiency, children were divided into separate classrooms by age and passed along, from grade to grade, like products on an assembly line. The...
Agriculture brought to human beings more than a new way of procuring food. It introduced a new way of thinking about the relationship between humans an nature. Hunter-gatherers considered themselves to be part of the natural world; they lived with nature, not against it. They...
Schooling that children are forced to endure–in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests–turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible....
