Albert Einstein once said that it is a miracle curiosity survives formal education. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t. When my husband Rolf and I decided almost 40 years ago that we wouldn’t send our then-unborn daughters to school, we knew that curiosity was one of the precious traits we didn’t want to risk them losing. In [...]
Wendy Priesnitz
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Learning is child’s work
Children’s ability to learn experientially through day-to-day living is the foundation of what happens in democratic schools and unschooling homes alike. Part of that experience is kids doing real work in the real world, motivated by their own real interests and goals. It is not pseudo work where kids are “allowed” to “help” adults or [...]
Education without coercion
Our education system was designed to fight and win political and economic wars. We needed people to build bombs, radar and airplanes. We now have different problems, such as climate change, hunger, toxic waste, terrorism and looming shortages of clean water. These issues require new types of solutions. Unfortunately, our public education system is not [...]
Redefining unschooling technology
What’s in a name? Lots, when it comes to describing something that’s as emotionally and politically charged, not to mention as full of assumptions, as parenting and education. In many cases, the terms “homeschooling,” “deschooling,” “unschooling,” “home-based learning,” “home-based education” and “self-directed learning” are used interchangeably. Unfortunately, there is no standardized terminology that everyone understands [...]
Challenging the purpose of schools
“The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.” Bertrand Russell Not only is it ineffective to try and force children to learn, it is also unjust. But if you ask most people why we need a strong [...]
Benefits of boredom
Over the centuries, many religions and philosophers (not to mention mothers!) have feared and even damned boredom. My mother, prompted perhaps by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who said it first, called boredom “the root of all evil”. The poet Wordsworth described it as a “savage torpor”. Early Christians classified it as one of the seven [...]
Unschooling as a feminist act
When I was a young mother, I wore a t-shirt with the words: “The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the boat.” The phrase put a spin on a 19th century poem entitled “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Rules the World” by American poet William Ross Wallace. I understood at the time that becoming [...]
A life of learning
For the past 40 years, I have had a vision of a world where children and young people are equal members of society, where they are liked, respected, trusted and empowered to control their own lives and to make their decisions about learning and life. And, for the past 35 years, it has been both [...]
Interference
This morning, as I walked through the harborside park near my home, I watched a mother and her young child who were also enjoying the warm sunshine. The little girl had on an immaculate white dress, white socks and shiny black shoes. Oblivious to what her activities might do to her clean clothes, she was [...]
Not yet a learning society
One of the principles behind most of the writing and speaking I’ve done about education over the past 30 years is that education is not something one produces in someone else; rather, it is something one does for oneself. Real learning is that which we have gained for ourselves, based on our own interests, motivations [...]
