“My best advice to you is: Whatever you do, do NOT take my advice.”
“I simply stepped out of the way and maintained my courage and my position in the face of constant disagreement, voiced opinion and attack. I held true and I stood my ground. I maintained my convictions and my commitment to allowing them to live in the kingdom of childhood. I protected them from outside influence and allowed their imaginations to soar. I instilled a lifelong love of learning in them and I shared my passion for reading. I allowed them to choose what they wanted to study and I provided the resources for them to delve in, unguided and undisturbed for however long they needed to gather what they believed to be enough understanding to satisfy their own personal drive.”
“The primary difference I see is that unschooling is an invitation to awaken and ennoble capabilities that exist within the child. Where traditional schooling is to fill the child with facts that we, as a collective have decided upon.”
“A lighthouse is kind of like an angel. Most of the people the light helps take it for granted. Until it’s not there.”
“The cost of a range of appropriate courses and training activities is much less than the cost of incompetence.”
“A person s integrity develops early in life. Once formed, it is difficult to alter, change, or improve.”
“Learning voyage, the greatest adventure.”
“Many of the world’s greatest geniuses all had in common that they were pulled from the school environment. They were freed to discover the undiscovered. They had the imagination to ‘see’ a different way and the drive to try to build what they had seen.”
“Once, it was possible to learn things, and to be shaped by your learning, he says. Once, to be a student meant to be formed by what you learned. To let it enter your soul. But today? We re drowning in openness, he says. In our sense of the possible. We re ready to take anything in - to learn about anything, and therefore about nothing.”
“The art and craft of early childhood teaching is in making decisions about fun, play and work. And it is this crafting that distinguishes the professional from the baby-sitter, parent or child minder.”
“Management is like sex - everyone thinks they’re good at it despite limited evidence.”
“There’s a fine line between child-like – learning as a child does, the natural way we learn most stuff – and being child-ish.”
“Walking the walk is one thing, but it is so much more powerful if you can talk it as well.”
“Annoyance has made me bilingual.”
“I don’t need to go to heaven or hell. I have been both places and always wanted more. I will settle for somewhere in between, so eternity never becomes dull and every miracle is something I never take for granted.”
“You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information.”
“The teacher is a catalyst to convert information from a high energy state (list of facts) to a low energy state (visual concept associated with known concepts).”