Quotations from Unschooling and other related Learning Theorists

"Created as a system of socio-psychological engineering, schule was a brutish, authoritarian indoctrination and fear were its primary conditioning agents. Today's schools are not the Prussian military schule of the 18th century; however, today, schooling is a huge part of the underlying, socio-psychological engineering mechanmis that makes social engineering not only feasible but highly successful."

Mark Beaumont (current) "When enough people around the world are ready to face the truth about school, and take action aimed at reclaiming the lives of our children away from government, then a massive revamping of our educational services will be at hand. When enough people have discovered the truth about where school comes from, why it came, and who was to benefit from it, a more liberating educational paradigm will surely emerge. When the powerful ideas regarding unschooling are embraced by enough people, a moment of critical mass is an inevitability, and with it a liberating transformation away from authoritarian, indoctrination-schooling is likely to follow." Mark Beaumont (current) "I discovered that by providing the children with autonomy regarding how they would be assessed for their final projects, the students would respond enthusiastically. By providing maximum autonomy over their final projects, I observed children exuding levels of motivation unrivaled by the more typical, final exams and other highly prescribed assignments. The more the locus-of-control was placed in the hands of the students over their learning in general, and over their final projects specifically, the more intrinsically motivated they were to engage them." Mark Beaumont (current) "If you wish to increase your child's motivation and zest for life, try providing more freedom for them to learn by playing as well as observing and experiencing adults as they go about their everyday lives. It behooves us as responsible and loving parents to set out children free so that they may direct their own lives. By setting your child free, you'll enable them to take a more central role in deciding their educational experience and future lives." Mark Beaumont (current) "Non-coercive interaction is the fundamental rule of engagement that helps give rise to unschooling. Having the autonomy to live and learn without being forced or coerced is an integral part of the happy family and society. Unschooling offers non-coercive ideas and processes for helping your child to find their own way with life and the world. An autonomous child is a happy and motivated child, and a happy and motivated child learns best. " Mark Beaumont (current)

"Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns alll the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly". John Taylor Gatto (1935 - ) "School that children are forced to endure - in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the "learning" is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children's true interests - turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children's natural feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels." Peter Gray (1944 -) "If freedom, personal responsibility, self-initiative, honesty, integrity, and concern for others rank high in your system of values, and if they represent characteristics you would like to see in your children, then you will want to be a trustful parent. Noen of these can be taught by lecturing, coercion, or coaxing. They are acquired or lost through daily life experiences that reinforce or suppress them. You can help your children build these values by living them yourself and applying them in your relationship with your children. Trust promotes trustworthiness. Self-initiative and all the traits that depend on self-initiative can develop only under conditions of freedom." Peter Gray (1944 -)

"School that children are forced to endure - in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the "learning" is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children's true interests - turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children's natural feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels." Peter Gray (1944 -) "If freedom, personal responsibility, self-initiative, honesty, integrity, and concern for others rank high in your system of values, and if they represent characteristics you would like to see in your children, then you will want to be a trustful parent. Noen of these can be taught by lecturing, coercion, or coaxing. They are acquired or lost through daily life experiences that reinforce or suppress them. You can help your children build these values by living them yourself and applying them in your relationship with your children. Trust promotes trustworthiness. Self-initiative and all the traits that depend on self-initiative can develop only under conditions of freedom." Peter Gray (1944 -) "The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalise it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions." Ken Robinson (1950 -)

"So these characteristic motivators, these if-then rewards, they’re really good for simple, straightforward, rule-based, what we might think of as algorithmic tasks, where you’re just following a set of instructions. And that’s what a lot of Americans– a lot of people in the industrialized world– did for a living for very long time. I mean, a lot of work was about turning the same screw the same way over and over, and when that kind of work started fading away, a lot of work– a lot of white collar work– was in some ways simply adding up columns of figures over and over again. That is, it was intellectual work, but it was pretty routine, algorithmic kind of work. And the truth is, what the science tells us is that for that kind of work, these carrot and stick, if-then motivators, they’re pretty good. They work pretty well. They don’t exactly ennoble the human spirit, but they’re fairly effective. The trouble is, is that for work that is non-routine, for work that isn’t algorithmic but is more conceptual, that requires big picture thinking, that requires a greater degree of creativity, that requires solving more complicated, complex challenges, the if-then motivators don’t work very well at all. And that’s not even a close call in the science. The behavioral science is very, very clear that– give people those kinds of motivators for creative, conceptual, complex tasks, and they will often underperform. So I think that people have always had this mix of drives, that’s what it is to be human, so I don’t think that their motivations necessarily have changed. I think what’s changed though, is the work that people are doing requires in some ways, a different technology for motivating people to do it."
Daniel Pink (1964- )

"The trouble is, is that if you’re trying to do anything creative, trying to solve a complex, conceptual problem, that kind of narrow, straight-ahead focus doesn’t help, it actually hurts. So in some ways, these if-then motivators work poorly for creative, conceptual tasks, in part because they work so well for the more routine, algorithmic tasks. That is, for those, a concentrated gaze of narrow vision is actually really effective. For creative tasks, they’re less effective"
Daniel Pink (1964 -)

"The other thing, which is a kind of an interesting phenomenon in the literature, is that sometimes adding a reward on top of something– that’s something that people inherently like– can actually make people less interested in the task. And so, for instance, if you think about something like open source. If you suddenly said, to some foundation or something, let’s start paying people who are contributing to open source, I actually think that would diminish participation in open source. Because I think what’s driving that participation is not the reward and punishment drive, but something more like the third drive, it’s about mastery, it’s about contributing, and so forth."
Daniel Pink (1964 - )

"And so I think you got to pay people enough. I would argue, pay people more than enough. In a sense that, it’s a paradox, but one of the best uses of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table, so people aren’t focused on money, they’re focused on the work. Once you do that, it’s really a matter of tapping the things that the science shows lead to enduring performance, particularly for more complex tasks. And that’s a sense of autonomy, self-direction, the desire to get better and better at something that matters, you can call that mastery, and also purpose, that is, doing what we do in the service of something larger than oneself."
Daniel Pink (1964 -)
"..dial back the carrot and stick motivators, and infuse the workplace with a greater sense of autonomy, allow people to make progress, and animate what the people are doing with a greater sense of purpose."
Daniel Pink (1964-)