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 bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.
What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.
Tags: education learning children unschooling schooling
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 if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."
It is the creed of a slave.
Tags: education children unschooling schooling
We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it
Ron RashTags: life happiness education fun schooling
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 of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.
J. KrishnamurtiTags: education unschooling schooling
What I learned on my own I still remember
Nassim Nicholas TalebTags: intelligence reading thinking education learning thought discovery academia schooling
In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
John Taylor GattoTags: education secularism schooling public-education
In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away.
Derrick JensenTags: life-experience time schooling classes
...some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school...
John GeddesTags: wisdom radio teach schooling solitutde dad childhood-memories old-chevy
Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful.
Christopher IsherwoodTags: schooling
There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.
Christopher IsherwoodTags: schooling
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