“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.” – John Holt

We are a secular group of families with children living and learning naturally in the Blue Mountains. We believe in home-based, non-institutionalised and non-coercive education. We meet socially for spontaneous get togethers.

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http://au.groups.yahoo.com/group/BM-NaturalLearners/

Natural Learning and Unschooling Quotes We Love

John Holt

“The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense … School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning.”

“What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent – in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.”

“I have used the words “home schooling” to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth in the word is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn’t a school at all.”

“Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them.”

“By nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. 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 to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.”

“Children are hard-wired to learn.”

“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.”

“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.”

“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves…and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

“To parents I say, above all else, don’t let your home become some terrible miniature copy of the school. No lesson plans! No quizzes! No tests! No report cards! Even leaving your kids alone would be better; at least they could figure out some things on their own. Live together, as well as you can; enjoy life together, as much as you can.”

“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.”

Beverley Paine

“Natural learning is not a method of teaching children. It is a way of looking at children and life. It isn’t an educational approach. It is a lifestyle choice!”

“Natural learning isn’t something we do with, or to, our children. Natural learning is what we allow to happen. It isn’t what we make or create. Natural learning happens despite what we do!”

“[Children] don’t love to learn, they love to do… and in the act of doing they learn.”

John Peacock

“Natural learning builds on curiosity, stimulating children to actively explore their world. Parents become managers and mentors helping their children learn from everyday experiences and finding people and resources in the community that will provide answers and take them that further step…”

Mary Griffith

“Unschooling is simply a way to tailor learning to the specific needs of each child and each family. No two unschooling families follow the same path – and no two children within the same unschooling family are likely to go exactly in the same direction.”

Rue Kream

“… there are reasons we choose not to teach our children. We believe that children (humans) seek out knowledge in the same way they seek out fun or food, and we believe that adults can do a lot to interfere with that desire to learn.”

“Ultimately I’d say that the reason we choose to unschool is because we want our children to be truly free.”

Jan Hunt

“The main element in successful unschooling is trust. We trust our children to know when they are ready to learn and what they are interested in learning. We trust them to know how to go about learning. Parents commonly take this view of learning during the child’s first two years, when he is learning to stand, walk, talk, and to perform many other important and difficult things, with little help from anyone. No one worries that a baby will be too lazy, uncooperative, or unmotivated to learn these things; it is simply assumed that every baby is born wanting to learn the things he needs to know in order to understand and to participate in the world around him. These one- and two-year-old experts teach us several principles of learning:

Children are naturally curious and have a built-in desire to learn first-hand about the world around them.
Children know best how to go about learning something.
Children need plentiful amounts of quiet time to think.
Children are not afraid to admit ignorance and to make mistakes.
Children take joy in the intrinsic values of whatever they are learning.
Children learn best about getting along with other people through interaction with those of all ages.
A child learns best about the world through first-hand experience.
Children need and deserve ample time with their family.
Stress interferes with learning.”

“Unschooling isn’t a technique; it’s living and learning naturally, lovingly, and respectfully together.”

Earl Stevens

“Unschooling isn’t a method, it is a way of looking at children and at life.”

“Unschooling children do real things all day long.”

Paramahansa Yogananda

“Coercion or compulsion never brings about growth. It is freedom that accelerates evolution.”

Quotes from John Holt have been taken from Life Without School Blog. The other quotes are from Joyous Learning Facebook page.

More quotes about natural learning can be found at Sandra Dodd’s Quotes for Unschoolers.