John Holt and unschooling
Rob Paterson is blogging some fierce (as they say down east) about John Holt and unschooling.
Rob quotes from Holt:
“Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.”
If you want some starting points for getting into unschooling, here are a few of my favorites:
- Google index of John Holt and unschooling
- Complete text of Deschooling Society by Ivan Illych
- John Taylor Gatto’s Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, an essay about what schools really teach. I used this essay to write about why people have a hard time experiencing actual freedom in a paper called “Open Space and the Legacy of Education” (.pdf)
[tags]John Holt, john taylor gatto, ivan illych[/tags]
