Jan Hunt > Quotes

“Produce your strong reasons – employ your intellect to shew wherein my intellect has erred or led others into error, but abstain from violence, which can prove only that you are powerful and vindictive, with-out proving that you have truth and justice on your side.” The resort to violence is a confession of weakness because he who would employ force would not do so unless his arguments and reasoning were weak and un-convincing. Truth or the effort to obtain the truth does not need to rely on force.”
― Jan Hunt, Everything Voluntary: From Politics to Parenting

“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”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“Learning is not the product of teaching.”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“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”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“I explained that unschooling isn’t a technique; it’s living and learning naturally, lovingly, and respectfully together.”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“There is no difference between living and learning … it is impossible, and misleading, and harmful to think of them as being separate.” John Holt”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“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”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“Gatto cautions us, “Between schooling and television, all the time children have is eaten up. That’s what has destroyed the American family.”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“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.”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual

“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.”
― Jan Hunt, The Unschooling Unmanual