Unschooled Quotes

“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“Conditioned by coercive schooling, young people lose their autonomy and natural learning inclinations and are instead trained to be taught. This process, according to Illich, then translates into a lifetime of institutionalized thinking that eradicates personal power.”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“Thomas Jefferson, for instance, recognized the essential connection between education and freedom, writing in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”12 Still, the institution of the family prevailed over the interests of the state. Jefferson advocated for a highly decentralized system of education, locally controlled by parents in small districts, or “wards” as he called them, with little government involvement. He also believed that parental rights and individual liberty outweighed mandatory compliance. In 1817, Jefferson wrote, “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“Schools were designed for obedience training and drill, and they persist today primarily toward those ends, regardless of what school administrators, teachers, parents, and students themselves might want the ends to be. The structural elements of schools—the confinement of students into age-segregated classrooms, the top-down hierarchy of authority, the required curricula, and the uniform systems of testing and grading—all dictate that obedience and memorization are the primary ends. As long as students obey by doing what the teacher tells them to do and memorize what the teacher tells them to memorize, they will pass. The only way to fail is to disobey.”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“Forced schooling is a cultural relic, reminiscent of a bygone age. Stuck preparing young people to do the jobs now done by robots, mass schooling ignores the cultural and economic realities of a new human era. Instead of robots, we need inventive thinkers, curious seekers, and passionate doers. Inventiveness, curiosity, and passion are all characteristics that young children naturally exude. We don’t need to train them for the jobs of the future; we just need to stop training these inborn characteristics out of them. We need to give them the freedom and opportunity to pursue their passions, follow their curiosity, and invent creative solutions to complex problems. Given the vast amount of information available to us, the creative skills necessary to process it all, and the seemingly insurmountable challenges our planet now faces, we desperately need to embrace a new paradigm of education. We need to let go of the notion of schooling—something someone does to someone else—and instead reclaim learning—something humans naturally do.”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“day there”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“Forced schooling was then intended as an antidote to those “corrupt parents,” but not, presumably, for morally superior parents like Mann, who continued to homeschool his own three children with no intention of sending them to the common schools he mandated for others.”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom

“If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It’s not about making learning happen. It’s about letting it happen.”11”
― Kerry McDonald, Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom