If you had always been free to learn, you would follow your natural tendency to find out as fully as possible about the things that interest you, cars or stars. We are all born with what they call “love of learning,” but it dives off into an elusive void when we go to school.
Tag archives for self-motivated learning
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I posted recently about what, in my opinion, is the hardest thing about unschooling. Today, I wanted to share a snapshot of the best thing: joyful learning. Learning that changes and expands horizons. Learning that sticks. This little 9-year-old wants to build things. Ever since she saw Handy Manny at age 4, she has wanted…
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We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions — if they have any — and…
— John Holt
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This article on a ten-year old math prodigy, Esther Okade, was shared with me recently. I loved it, but not for the “prodigy” reason. When the child showed great aptitude in math, her parents enrolled her in a private school. Her mom said, “One day we were coming back home and she burst out in tears…
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It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
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A little over a year ago, my daughters attended Yoga for Congo for the first time. They had helped me prepare for the event many times, and we had discussed the subject matter and the seriousness of the issue. Nothing could have prepared me, though, for what it was like to have them in that…
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This. In this brilliant article, Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle writes about a conversation with a young girl in 10th grade. This girl is so afraid of not getting an “A” that she is afraid to try anything new. In our current system of education, kids almost have to get a 4.0 to feel like they…
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Jamie Anderson is the next in our famous unschooler’s series, and this is especially fun, because, unlike the others we have covered so far, she is a contemporary! Jamie is the first woman to win gold in slopestyle snowboarding. Jamie with her mom (photo credit: Mike Stobe/Getty Images) In an interview with Today, Jamie’s mom…
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I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
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Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
— Leonardo da Vinci
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One thing that I have committed to myself, again and again, is allowing each interest and each possible topic or “subject” in my children’s learning to have equal weight. In the education of my children, I agree with Sir Ken Robinson that creativity is as important as literacy. Creativity can come into play in any…