When You Have Interest, You Have Education

This TedTalk is excellent. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we as a society think about teaching. Click on the video below to listen to 17 minutes of fascinating, moving and funny stuff.

But first a quote from the talk:

"Education is a self organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenonmenon..."

After 16 years of unschooling Justin, I have experienced firsthand the above quote as absolutely true. :) Enjoy!

What Does Unschooling Look Like

The quote below does a great job explaining what unschooling is all about. :)

"(Unschoolers) maintain that a child's learning should be curiosity-driven rather than dictated by teachers and textbooks, and that forcing kids to adhere to curricula quashes their natural inclination to explore and ask questions.
(Unschooled) children can organize their knowledge in free and better ways. They never need to feel they are through learning, or past the point that they can begin something new. Each thing they discover can be useful eventually. If we help provide them with ever-changing opportunities to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, move and discuss, what they know will exceed in breadth and depth what any school's curriculum would have covered. It won't be the same set of materials--it will be clearer and larger but different."

The above, from the beginning, has been our perspective and approach to unschooling Justin and it's exactly what we have observed from him....love it! I hope to start blogging more soon with some more examples! :) Btw, the quote is from the article titled, "The Most Empowered Children of the Future Will Be Deprogrammed and Deschooled." In my opinion, the article is very well-written! It can be found at preventdisease.com  

Click below to go to article:

http://preventdisease.com/news/12/031612_The-Most-Empowered-Children-of-The-Future-Will-Be-Deprogrammed-Deschooled.shtml