Our system of grading and ranking to motivate students seems almost perfectly designed to promote cynicism and cheating.

Students understand that the rules distinguishing cheating from not cheating in school are like the rules of a game. But it’s a game they did not choose to play.

In times past, the most frequent cheaters were the “poor students,” who cheated out of desperation. Today, however, the highest incidences of reported cheating are among the “best students,” the ones aiming for the top colleges and graduate schools, the ones who experience the greatest pressures toexcel.

they are perpetually like students, constantly more interested in impressing others than in real achievement. These are the ones who continue to cheat—in science, business, law, politics, or whatever career they pursue. For them, the habit of cheating that was cultivated in school remains for a lifetime.

regardless of the lectures that students might hear in school about the value of helping others, school works against such behavior. By design, it teaches selfishness. The forced competitiveness, the constant grading and ranking of students, contain the implicit lesson that each student’s job is to look out for himself or herself and to do better than others. Indeed, too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper, by raising the grading curve and lowering the helper’s position on it.

The law requires that you attend school, regardless of how you are treated. You are not among the minority whose parents have the means and will to send them to a private alternative school or to convince the school board that they can educate them adequately at home. You have no choice. What do you do? If you are like most of the hundreds of thousands of picked-on kids who suffer like this every school day, you somehow suck it up.

Note: suffocation

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Bullying occurs in all institutions where people who have no political power and are ruled in top-down fashion are required by law or economic necessity to remain in that setting.

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But despite all the lip service that educators devote to it, most students learn to avoid thinking critically about their schoolwork. They learn that their job in school is to get high marks on tests and that critical thinking interferes. To get a good grade, you need to figure out what the teacher wants you to say and then say it. I’ve heard that sentiment expressed countless times by college students as well as by high school students, in discussions held outside the classroom.

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In a system in which we teachers do the grading, few students are going to criticize or even question the ideas we offer, and if we try to induce criticism by grading for it, we generate false criticism.

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It may even be fair to say that teachers in our school system are no freer to teach as they wish than are students to learn as they wish.

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People naturally want to make sense of their world. That, to Greenberg, is the essence of human curiosity.

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If all public schools in the United States followed the Sudbury model, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money would be saved each year.

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Mitra’s experiments illustrate how three core aspects of our human nature—curiosity, playfulness, and sociability—can combine beautifully to serve the purpose of education.

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In Mitra’s demonstrations in India, curiosity led children to approach and manipulate the computer, playfulness led them to become skilled at using it, and sociability caused the new knowledge and skills to spread like wildfire from child to child.

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If you want to see the raw emotions of curiosity and discovery writ large on the face of a scientist who doesn’t hide emotions, watch any normal nine-month-old baby exploring a new object.

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Children in school are more or less continuously evaluated, and the concern for evaluation and pleasing the teacher (or, for some, rebellion against pleasing the teacher) often overrides and subverts the possibility of developing genuine interests.

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Curiosity, playfulness, and meaningful conversation are all thwarted in school, because they require freedom.

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When research subjects believe their performance is being observed and evaluated, those who are already skilled become better and those who are not so skilled become worse.

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Evaluation has this pernicious effect because it produces a mind-set that is opposite from the playful state of mind, which is the ideal state for learning new skills, solving new problems, and engaging in all sorts of creative activities.

Note: spaces of permission with nothing to prove..

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the freedom to quit is such a crucial aspect of the definition of play. Without that freedom, rules of play would be intolerable.

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Geniuses often seem to be those who somehow retain, into adulthood, the imaginative capacities of small children.

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The mind at play is alert, but not stressed.

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The Power of Play Lies in Its Triviality

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Perhaps play would be more respected if we called it something like “self-motivated practice of life skills,” but that would remove the lightheartedness from it and thereby reduce its effectiveness. So, we are stuck with the paradox. We must accept play’s triviality in order to realize its profundity.

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In the informal game, keeping your playmates happy is far more important than winning, and that’s true in life as well.

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To be a good player of informal sports you can’t blindly follow rules.

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Adult direction leads to the assumption that rules are determined by an outside authority and thus not to be questioned. When children play just among themselves, however, they come to realize that rules are merely conventions, established to make the game more fun and more fair, and can be changed to meet changing conditions. For life in a democracy, few lessons are more valuable.

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As they move up the ladder from children’s leagues to high school to college to professional, an ever smaller number make the teams. The rest become spectators for the rest of their lives, growing fat in the stands and on the couch—unless they learn to play informally.

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Real life is an informal game. The rules are endlessly modifiable and you must do your part to create them. In the end, there are no winners or losers; we all wind up in the same place.

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the decline of children’s free play since about 1955 has been accompanied by a continuous rise in anxiety, depression, and feelings of helplessness in young people. Related to these findings, there has also been an increase in narcissism and decline in empathy.

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Play is nature’s way of teaching children how to solve their own problems, control their impulses, modulate their emotions, see from others’ perspectives, negotiate differences, and get along with others as equals. There is no substitute for play as a means of learning these skills. They can’t be taught in school. For life in the real world, these lessons of personal responsibility, self-control, and sociability are far more important than any lessons that can be taught inschool.

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In the age-segregated environment that we create with conventional schools, contrived means of bringing older children and younger ones into contact may be essential if we want to build up children’s capacity for empathy and compassion.

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Freedom is so strong a drive that it can never be fully beaten out of a person, regardless of age.

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parents worry about their children’s abilities to make a living more than they did in times past, and this contributes to their increased tendency to view childhood as a time of résumé building rather than a time of play. Somehow, parents believe, if they can get their children into the right adult-directed extracurricular or volunteer activities, get them to achieve high scores on tests, and get them into the most prestigious schools, they can protect their children’s futures. They are wrong, of course, but the perception persists.

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My daughter started school so excited and within two or three days was crying and asking to go back to preschool. That eventually passed, but the child that has emerged when she gets home is so different.

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We have allowed the schooling system to blind us to the natural ways of children.

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You can be happy or unhappy in any profession, but you can’t be happy, at least not for long stretches, if you feel that your life is not yours.

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The number of US children of school age (five to seventeen) who are homeschooled grew from about 850,000 in 1999 to an estimated two million or slightly more in 2011, or from about 1.7 percent to nearly 4 percent of the school-age population.

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With experience, homeschooling parents become increasingly trustful of their children’s abilities to direct their own education, and some of them becomeunschoolers.

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Unschooling is the category of home-based education most compatible with trustful parenting. The term was coined in the 1970s by the educational theorist and former teacher John Holt, in his magazine Growing Without Schooling. Defined most simply, unschooling is not schooling. Unschooling parents do not send their children to school, and at home they do not do the kinds of things that are done at school. They do not establish a curriculum, do not require particular assignments for the purpose of education, and do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their kids freedom…

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In response to our question about the main advantages of unschooling for their family, the majority talked about the positive effects it had on their children’s happiness, assertiveness, or self-confidence; the positive effects it had on their children’s curiosity and learning; and the positive effects it had on family closeness and family life in general.

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All in all, unschooling “ungraduates” seem to have no particular difficulty getting into colleges and doing well there if they choose that route, and no particular difficulty getting good jobs with or without college.

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The more oppressive the school system becomes, the more it is driving people away,

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At some point in the not-too-distant future, I predict, we’ll reach a tipping point. Everyone will know at least one Kate Fridkis, who grew up not doing anything like standard schooling and who is doing just fine in life. People will begin to say things like, “Look at Kate, and Bob, and Mary Jane; none of them went to school and they’re happy, productive, responsible citizens. Why should I send my kids to school if they are unhappy there?

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People will begin to demand changes in the laws that make schooling compulsory or that define what schooling has to be, and this will enable more to leave the compulsory system without having to do the legal loop-de-loops that are now required and that keep many from even trying.

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History tells us that when people see freedom as a viable option, they choose it. When adults see that coercive schooling isn’t necessary for success in the culture, they will find it hard not to choose freedom for their kids, and the kids themselves will demand it.

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Think of what could be done with even a fraction of the roughly $600 billion of taxpayer money that is currently spent on coercive K–12 schools every year in the United States!

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Per student, Sudbury schools cost only about half of what we now spend per student on coercive public schools, so this plan would result in great savings to taxpayers. Another possibility would be a system of community centers, open to everyone free of charge.