Quotes from Jan Hunt

As a homeschooling parent, I have often wondered who learns more in our family, the parent or the child. The topic I seem to be learning the most about is the nature of learning itself.

It became clear to me that they expected children to submit to the school system and sacrifice their own interests, even if that would break their spirit. I

School always appeared to me like a prison, and I could never make up my mind to stay there, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was such a joy to run about in the free air, or to paddle around in the water." Claude Monet

Learning is not the product of teaching.

There is no difference between living and learning … it is impossible, and misleading, and harmful to think of them as being separate." John Holt

So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are the things the system must do to keep things going on as they are.

If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued." John Holt

I explained that unschooling isn't a technique; it's living and learning naturally, lovingly, and respectfully together.

When people say that school prepares children for the real world, what's implied is that it is the difficult parts of school (doing things you don't want to do, forced interaction with peers, following rules that you don't believe in) that are important. What's implied is that the real world is going to be an unhappy place and that being treated unfairly by people is a part of life.