education

Spending time to learn and to gather better information is what we do most in our lives. We go to school, spend time there, and learn things important in our life. We do this only for one reason, to be happy.

In a 1968 study of daily life in classrooms, Philip W. Jackson wrote that students spend as much as 50 percent of their time waiting for something to happen. They wait for teachers to pass out papers. They wait for slower students to get their questions answered. They wait for the lunch bell to ring. Alas, forty-five years after Jackson published his book, millions of American students are still waiting. They__e waiting for all of the old reasons, and one relatively new one: they__e waiting for our education system to catch up with their lives.

each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Aligned Movement worked. They have no idea about the numerous wars India has fought against Pakistan or China. They have no idea, for instance, of what many people call the greatest threat to India__ internal security: the Naxal movement. What created this Naxal movement? And why is the movement popular where it is? Our youth doesn__ know.

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.

What? No defense? Any student of mine must be able to defend his ideas against an attack. No matter how you spend your life, your wit will defend you more often than a sword. Keep it sharp!

A wealth of knowledge is openly accessible in nature. Our ancestors knew this and embraced the natural cures found in the bosoms of the earth. Their classroom was nature. They studied the lessons to be learned from animals, knowing that much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. Animals are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.

I dream of a house full of books.

...there is a danger of churning out students who are rapid processors of information but may not necessarily be more reflective, thoughtful, and able to give sustained consideration to the information that matters most.

I'm not as interested in dispensing knowledge on how to make a living ass I am in helping young people learn how to make a life...

Education is unfolding the wings of head and heart together. The job of a teacher is to push the students out of the nest to strengthen their wings.

Passion for books is the desire to read.

Bruner discusses the need for teachers to understand that children should want to study for study's own sake, for learnings's sake, not for the sake of good grades or examination success. The curriculum should, in other words, be interesting. (Yes, it sounds too obvious even to say, but sometimes the emphasis on content has trumped all other considerations, including that of making learning interesting.)

Every mistake is a new learning adventure.

Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes...The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and...the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.

Intelligence is ongoing, individual adaptability. Adaptations that an intelligent species may make in a single generation, other species make over many generations of selective breeding and selective dying.

I live within the world of books.

The greatest fulfillment, personal development.

With great enthusiasm and determination you will master the art in your field.