this thing they call education

I was listening to radio free school this morning and thinking about how I ought to do that more often. it rarely occurs to me to listen to the radio on my computer. I am still not adjusted to having a machine that works well, and kind of can't believe my luck! meanwhile, these quotes are helping me focus on the larger issues.

"If education should mean anything at all, it must insist on the free growth and
development of the innate forces and tendencies of the child. In this way alone can
we hope for the free individual and eventually also for a free community, which
shall make interference and coercion of human growth impossible." - Emma Goldman

"What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ouught to go) and to find out what they want to find out." - John Holt

"The effort to channel the process of growing up according to a preconceived curriculum and method discourages and wastes many of the best human powers to learn and cope.... Schooling isolates the young from the older generation and alienates them." - Paul Goodman