To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise...

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, “Because they’re scared.” I used to suspect that children’s defeatism had something to do with their...

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

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. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm...

The myth that if you don’t start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of...

If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself

Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are.

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern...

Cause and effect is the basis of my education, leading me to an essence far more profound than any rule of societal conditioning.

School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong,...

Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences....

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...

Go, do whatever you like.” To help children become skilled thinkers and learners, to help them become people who make and do, we need a life centered around those experiences. We need to show them...

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...

The philosophy of project-based homeschooling — this particular approach to helping children become strong thinkers, learners, and doers — is dependent upon the interest and the enthusiastic participation and leadership of the learners themselves, the...

My goal has always been to inspire in them an ongoing love of learning. To awaken a feeling where their work is their passion, so that they never feel burdened or trapped by meeting their...

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...

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...

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...

Each of us is born with a crazy passion to learn. Each of us craves knowledge of our world and our place within it. We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to...