Unschooling article

Just read this interesting article from Tulsa, which features a family with now mostly grown unschoolers, and a family with all the kids still at home. I particularly liked the following part [emphasis mine] where an associate professor of education says that kids don't naturally want to learn, and John Holt's views on that subject:

“I think it would be a wonderful way to be schooled,” says Dr. Diane Beals, associate professor of education at the University of Tulsa. “But it takes a great deal of thought and planning. It would work for kids who are curious and highly motivated, and parents who are highly motivated and have a deep understanding of the fields of knowledge they are trying to teach their children. But, there are a lot of kids who just naturally don’t want to learn anything academic. The basic assumption is that kids do want to learn. I don’t think you can say that about all kids everywhere.”

John Holt believed that all children are hard wired to learn. “This idea that children won’t learn without outside reward or penalties…usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” wrote Holt in his book, How Children Fail. “So many people have said to me, ‘If we didn’t make children do things, they wouldn’t do anything.’ Even worse, they say, ‘If I weren’t made to do things, I wouldn’t do anything.’ It is the creed of a slave. When people say that terrible thing about themselves, I say, ‘You may believe that, but I don’t believe it. You didn’t feel that way about yourself when you were little. Who taught you to feel that way?’ To a large degree, it was school.”