In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.”
– Martin H. Fischer (1879- )
“Too many children grow up trying to please others, without ever quite knowing what they really want or what really interests them.”
– Naomi Fisher, 2021, Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, 7: Parenting—Magical Counting, Attachment and Control
“Freedom of choice for children is more complicated that it might first appear. […] They can’t choose equally if they know that one choice will result in a happy parent, while the other choice results in disappointment. This is particularly true if those parental preferences are unspoken. Make it explicit, and then everyone can discuss it. Keep it quiet, and the children will know, but they won’t feel able to bring it up.”
– Naomi Fisher, 2021, Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, 7: Parenting—Magical Counting, Attachment and Control
“[C]ults have long realised that if you can get inside someone’s head and manipulate how they think, they will control themselves. This makes your task far easier. What’s more, cult members will tell everyone that it’s their choice and they love it. They even look happy. If you can convince a person that their future salvation is dependent on complying with your demands, you will have no trouble at all convincing them to do what you say.”
– Naomi Fisher, 2021, Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, 7: Parenting—Magical Counting, Attachment and Control
“This focus on teaching and moulding children is everywhere, and the atmosphere it creates is one of pressure for children and parents. […]
For some middle-class children, everything that they do is carefully orchestrated by adults and there for a purpose. Sports are to develop co-ordination and team co-operation. Arts and crafts are for fine motor skills and to develop colour awareness. Martial arts are for emotion regulation and confidence. Even messy play is now a planned activity, promoted for its sensory benefits…
Sometimes it seems as if children’s whole lives are one long improvement project. Nothing is done just because it’s fun.”
– Naomi Fisher, 2021, Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, 7: Parenting—Magical Counting, Attachment and Control
“It’s a sobering moment for parents, when they realise that, given the choice, their children really don’t want to do the things that they do at school. At school, children are powerless. They have no choice at all about what they do, or when they do it. When children have more power—as they often do at home—they choose something different.”
– Naomi Fisher, 2021, Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning, 1: Getting an Education
“[T]he full freedom to direct one’s own life also includes having private property in one’s own body, the liberty to acquire or relinquish private property, with the consent of others, and the enforcement of the obligations that others owe to one, in an environment in which the bulk of resources are freely exchangeable private property.”
– Danny Frederick, 2020, Freedom, Indeterminism and Fallibilism, Chapter 7: Conclusion, p. 249
“The conventional model of K-12 schooling is based on two assumptions, both wrong. The first is that, out of all the world’s knowledge, there is some subset about the right size to fill K-12 that everyone should learn, or at least be exposed to. The second is that the way to educate children is to sit them down and tell them what some authority, typically teacher and textbook, have decided they should know. The first assumption is, I think, not only mistaken but indefensible.”
– David D. Friedman, 2014, The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 65: Unschooling: A Libertarian Approach to Children
“The second assumption is also wrong. As all students and most teachers know, the usual result of making someone study something of no interest to him is that he memorizes as much as he has to in order to pass the course then forgets it as rapidly as possible thereafter. People learn things much more easily and remember them longer if they are things they want to learn.”
– David D. Friedman, 2014, The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 65: Unschooling: A Libertarian Approach to Children
“Not only is the assumption about how children learn wrong, it teaches a dangerous lesson—that the way to find out what is true is to locate an authority and believe what he tells you. One of the crucial intellectual skills is the ability to judge sources of information on internal evidence, to learn to distinguish between an author or speaker who cares whether what he says is true and one who does not. The conventional model of schooling anti-teaches that skill. The student is presented with two authorities, teacher and textbook, and, unless the teacher is unusually good, expected to believe them. Quite often, judged at least by my experience, that is a mistake. Much of what is taught in school is not true.”
– David D. Friedman, 2014, The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 65: Unschooling: A Libertarian Approach to Children
“Perhaps more important, they did not learn that education was something rather like cod liver oil, good for you but bad tasting, or that reading books is something you do because you are assigned to do it. When my daughter got to college she was shocked to discover that when her favorite class was cancelled for a day, the other students were glad instead of disappointed.”
– David D. Friedman, 2014, The Machinery of Freedom, Chapter 65: Unschooling: A Libertarian Approach to Children
“Happy is he that is happy in children.”
– Thomas Fuller, 1732, Gnomologia
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations F’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/