Unschooling Rules Quotes

“Learning is a full contact sport. To learn something new, a student has to do something new and often be somewhere new. Rather than viewing and treating students who want to do something new as troublemakers who need to be fixed, we should recognize that they will be the engines of improvements in our standard of living. Point of fact, they always have been.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The truth here is that for schools, getting out of the way may be the best thing they can do. Students, left alone, will build things. They will create unique, surprising ways to meet specific needs that often only they understand (even if the need is to enable an elaborate prank). Building can be done with computer code or lumber or ingredients or fabric. And building is the opposite of consuming, which is done with movies, textbooks, restaurant meals, most video games, or lectures.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“No matter what his or her age, when a child has a serious and productive interest in something, do anything possible to feed it. Be the perfect enabler. Drive anywhere. Fly anywhere. Rearrange schedules. Get or otherwise provide access to the supplies and props (and animals and vehicles and equipment and …). Find the experts, communities, even mentors. (Eventually you’ll want to find people who can provide real and credible feedback.) Just as importantly, protect the child from the trivial work inevitably and often mindlessly and reflexively foisted on him or her by others. A year absolutely dedicated to a single area of deep passion is better than the potpourri of modern curricula.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Socialization has to happen despite school, and perhaps even to compensate for school, rather than through school. So it may be more accurate to think of any school social time not as a solution to the need for socialization, but as negative social time that requires more positive get-togethers to overcome the bad influence.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Worse, tests emphasize exactly the wrong skills. They emphasize the memorization of massive amounts of facts that neurologically have a half-life of about 12 hours. They focus on short-term rewards through cramming to compensate for a failure in long-term development of value. It is no wonder we have financial meltdowns caused by successful students. We have to swallow a hard pill. The issue is not how do we make tests better? Or how can we have more or different types of tests? Or how do we arrange for more parts of a school program (such as a teacher’s worth) to be based on tests? The reality is, tests don’t work except as a blunt control-and-motivation mechanism for the classroom, the academic equivalent of MSG or sugar in processed food. In place of schools as testing centers, we have to begin imagining and setting up learning environments that involve no tests at all, that rely on real assessment and the creation of genuine value instead.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The truth is, those transcripts compress or outright lose more information and insight than they retain. Instead, the future is student portfolios. Portfolios are skimmable but dense collections of media that show off a person’s capabilities and passions.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Those defending the current educational system will predictably demand that every new approach to education should meet a threshold no old approach even comes close to meeting. It is a near-perfect deflection strategy. But it is ultimately a bluff that needs to be called out.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The education-industrial complex wants to sell as many school hours as possible. That’s their business. So they want parents and students to assume, when those students reach the end of high school, that they will spend the next 4 years in college. The decision is not “if,” “why,” or “when,” but “which,” and what they are buying is not only the big service but also as many add-ons as possible.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Children need to spend as much time as possible around the adults who love them. Ideally, this means parents and grandparents. It can also mean the right aunt or uncle. This is because children need to be around adults who care about their long-term future. Not their behavior next week, or next season, but 10 or 15 years from now. The alternatives are necessarily grim. Children become pawns in systems. They are used to meet contrived short-term goals. Teachers use them to get good test scores. Coaches use them to win games. They become the recipient of shortcuts. And their time is auctioned off.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Collectively, the education-industrial complex, including legislators, school boards, school administrators, teachers, and school vendors, displays many of the behaviors of a monopoly. Education services consume an increasingly larger share of a nation’s GDP. Schools try to standardize as completely as possible the offerings. They are inflexible in dealing with customers and the community. Students are expected to change to meet the needs of the offering, as opposed to the other way around.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Children are not raw materials to be made into productive citizens by “the system.” Children are beautiful living souls, as much angel as devil, each deserving of a hero’s journey through life, where they can strive and fail and grow up to change the world.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Above all, each and every one of us must keep asking questions. Why? Because in education, lives are always on the line, and it’s up to people like you—people with courage—to begin to say aloud, “The old way isn’t working.” It’s time to dive into the world of unschooling to find the leaders of tomorrow”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“46. The future is portfolios, not transcripts. (Page 117) 29. Homework helps school systems, not students. (Page 71) 16. Embrace all technologies. (Page 39) 11. Use microcosms as much as possible in learning programs. (Page 29) 24. Teaching is leadership. Most teaching is bad leadership. (Page 59) 39. Five subjects a day? Really? (Page 99) 15. If you care about learning, start with food.(Page 37) For parents of children in traditional schools: 12. Internships, apprenticeships, and interesting jobs beat term papers, textbooks, and tests. (Page 31) 13. Include meaningful work. (Page 33) 25. Expose more, teach less. (Page 61) 43. Minimize “the drop-off.” (Page 109) 44. Increase exposure to non–authority figure adults. (Page 111) 14. Create and use periods of reflection. (Page 35) 30. Every day, adults are role models of learning (whether or not they want to be). (Page 73)”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Parents care more than any institution about their children.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The first truth is that this is a big decision. It is a decision that has many pros and cons: from credibility, mainstreaming, lifelong friendships, and pre-reqs for worthwhile advanced degrees on the one hand to binge drinking, staggering debt and subsequent indentured servitude, high drop out rates (especially for males), aimlessness, and protracted adolescence on the other. Selecting a college is also a different decision than it was 30 years ago, or 20, or 10. College costs have been rising faster than the economy and inflation for decades. Meanwhile, the predictive value of a college education is going down as corporations are increasingly less likely to provide extended training resources and opportunities to new grads. This is a result of the average length of tenure for new employees going ever downward.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The best student portfolios must feature these attributes, among others, if they are to be of most value: The collections of work will cover years, even decades. Only over time can the threads of passions and other themes be drawn. They will be multimedia, using words, photographs, and video clips. They will include external validation, where appropriate. This may include awards, references in local papers, and letters of thanks from recipients.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Grouping students by the same age is just a bad idea. The education-industrial complex is structured around organizing children by age. This is a bad idea for so many reasons.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“No matter what his or her age, when a child has a serious and productive interest in something, do anything possible to feed it. Be the perfect enabler.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The next generation of engineers and scientists are not going to be the ones who are the best “students” who memorize a given week’s lists of tables and equations before heading off to history class where they do the same with historical figures and dates. In fact, it will be a failing graduate school that draws from this lot. The next generation of engineers and scientists will be the ones who are skipping the class but painfully and meticulously gathering the building blocks in their secret workshop and putting together something unprecedented.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Each child has a spark of genius waiting to be discovered, ignited, and fed. And the goal of schools shouldn’t be to manufacture “productive citizens” to fill some corporate cubicle; it should be to inspire each child to find a “calling” that will change the world. The jobs for the future are no longer Manager, Director, or Analyst, but Entrepreneur, Creator, and even Revolutionary.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The education-industrial system is addicted to homework. From a “business” perspective, it meets the needs of a K-12 school perfectly: It reduces the responsibility and accountability of the existing teachers and school processes. It makes parents accountable to the school, instead of the other way around. It keeps the student feeling guilty and unempowered. It maintains the illusion that there is so much to teach and the school mission is so important that they are worth consuming all aspects of a child’s life.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Children should have as much exposure as possible to animals. In all animals, including domestic, farm, and wild, are entire curricula. There are biology, sociology, genetics, economics, history, cultures, communication, language, hierarchies, governance, relationships sweeping story arcs, morality, even nutrition, just to name a few. Animals are the perfect microcosms. They are life. But it doesn’t count if the animals are just images or characters in a book. A poster of a kitten clinging to a branch with the words “Hang in there!” doesn’t count either. There is no greater example of the “flattening of content” that classes achieve than a “unit study” that examines, even purports to love, animals but does not actually engage any on a regular basis. Worse still, the more removed a culture is from animals, the more stylized and inaccurately the animals are inevitably represented. Tribes in Africa portray hippos as the deadly, fierce creatures they are. By the time most schoolchildren see them in the United States, they have morphed into “Mr. Hippo gets in his car to drive to work,” complete with his bright pink skin and marshmallow-shaped teeth. Dogs and cats, chickens and cows, songbirds and frogs are all there, waiting to be engaged. They have so much to teach us that any attempt to segregate environments of learning from them should never be accepted. In”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Sitting through a classroom lecture is painful for most people most of the time. We all know this, yet so many deny it or view it as a personal failing. When human beings are required to sit and listen, we squirm. We watch the clock tick slowly. Minutes can seem like hours. We escape into our own head. We invent activities to either occupy or numb ourselves. The most talented classroom sitters create micro-tasks to busy their hands and the other 80 percent of their minds. The pain is cumulative. The first hour of lecture in a day is bearable. The second is hard. The third is white-hot excruciating. The highly engaging presenter who periodically arises in the classroom does little to soften the physiological impact of the subsequent dull one. This reality goes beyond a power thing, or even an interest thing, or a quality of the teacher thing. Even when corporate leaders and heads of state attend highly relevant daylong events at which they listen to the highest-tier speakers, they are suppressing their own body ticks 90 minutes into the lecture. The lunch break becomes an oasis. Students are psychologically ravished daily by this onslaught. And it is costly on all involved—teachers, administrators, parents, siblings. Although this recommendation subverts most industrial business and logistics models, 2 non-adjacent hours of lecture a day should be the greatest number for any institution or program. And the most successful will have even less than that. This requires an alternative approach.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Rather than viewing and treating students who want to do something new as troublemakers who need to be fixed, we should recognize that they will be the engines of improvements in our standard of living. Point of fact, they always have been. To”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“we have built a reward structure to praise those students who can sit in classrooms better than anyone else. We let them run our planet. However,”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“The teacher might be talking about history or math, but what the students in a traditional classroom are learning is how to be students in a classroom. And they are learning it very well. They are learning how to take notes. They are learning how to surreptitiously communicate with peers. They are learning how to ask questions to endear themselves to authority figures. It”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Many school programs seem to offer either The Cultural Literacy Track or The Vocational Track. The Cultural Literacy programs are designed for the “smart kids” who are going to go on to ever-higher levels of both education and financial success. This track, with no pretense of being real world, includes classes on classics, foreign languages, and math theory (such as calculus). It is a curriculum based on “teach what has been taught.” The Vocational programs are for the “remedial kids” who are going to have only blue-collar futures if they are in high school (taking classes such as wood working) or inflexible paraprofessional paths if they are in college (such as degrees in physical therapy). This two-tier approach is an immoral sorting system with crippling consequences. Maybe worse, it also presents a false dichotomy. Instead, true wisdom comes from a synthesis of those two perspectives and more. The”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“the goal of schools shouldn’t be to manufacture “productive citizens” to fill some corporate cubicle; it should be to inspire each child to find a “calling” that will change the world.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education

“Thankfully, when working with between one and five students, formal instruction and practice can be much richer, as well as more targeted. Thus 2 structured hours of instruction and practice can cover more content than a full industrial school day.”
― Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education