“Changing a world view is not an easy thing to achieve. There is no lack of people who are convinced that there’s something seriously wrong with the educational system. Even the most devoted advocates of traditional schools can’t help noticing that the system gobbles up incredible sums of money at an ever-increasing rate, which nevertheless rarely seems to produce satisfactory results. But it’s much more difficult to go from there to a completely different world view which concludes that the whole traditional way of looking at education is wrong.”
“The raw material is there. All the elements that we want for effective adulthood in the 21st century are there in the child. This is where the paradigm shift comes in. What it means for education and for schooling is that we just have to let these elements ripen and mature. The best service we can render a child in making the transition from childhood to adulthood is not to get in the way. Any school that does nothing more than promise not to get in the way is worth any tuition you can muster, because that’s the school that will guarantee the fullest, easiest, most complete growth of all those traits from childhood to adulthood. The essence of a good school, educationally speaking, is staying out of the way of the child’s native biologically-produced drives and tendencies. Evolution has taken care of the maturation process. The human race did not wait for the public school system in the United States in order to figure out how to mature. All the good things that happened throughout history happened without the aid of the school system developed in the West that now claims that it’s indispensable to progress.”
