One of my dearest friends also just so happens to be in the process of getting her Phd. in Education Theory. This morning at breakfast I said to her that, for my little unschooling project, I need to be all up in her thought process and studies. For instance, she is reading a book called Radical Pedagogy that I feel sure I need to read. Who knows what more besides? But she turned to me and said that what I am doing would farther inform her degree than any possible research. She said that the predominate research, going back decades and decades, all point to the need to emphasis humanity in elementary education. She recommended I look up Vygotsky, a Russian education scholar who said, in essence, that elementary education should be a process of bringing children into culture.

Which is a mind expanding thought for me. As it is exactly the culture of industrial education that I find abhorrent. I consider it the opposite of human and I struggle, here at home, to create a culture and to convey that to the children instead. No only do I stand in opposition to the predominate culture in which to raise children, I am creating a new one as I go. The new culture is based, mostly, on my intuition, my heart, and my observations about what works and creates facility in the adult world.

My friend says that the research on educational theory is clear and stands in direct opposition to current industrial educational practice. As if, she said, there were an actual wall between research results and industry. What research can't implement is being done by homeschoolers. And with that happy thought, I'll leave a list of quotes I've found in the process of searching for Vygotsky.

It is important to remember that the decision of what to make the basics of education, like every major curriculum decision, depends not simply on the way the world is but on the way we think it should be, on the kind of life we believe to be worth living, and on the kind of society we believe to be worth living in.

-Jane Roland Martin, “Two Dogmas of Curriculum”

Education is too consequential to too many constituencies to leave to professional educators.

-Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education

Good and evil are asymmetrical; there are more ways to harm people than to help them, and harmful acts can hurt them to a greater degree than virtuous acts can make them better off.

-Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate

We need a surer sense of what to teach to whom and how to go about teaching it in such a way that it will make those taught more effective, less alienated, and better human beings.

-Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education

“Thinking about thinking” has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.

-Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education

Education is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it.

-Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education

My role as a “progressive” teacher is not only that of teaching mathematics or biology but also of helping the students to recognize themselves as the architects of their own cognition process.-Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom

How we choose to believe and speak and treat others, how we choose a civic role for ourselves, is the deepest purpose of a liberal education and of the act of teaching.

-A. Bartlett Giamatti, “To Make Oneself Eternal”

Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.

-Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach

The student is infinitely more important than the subject matter.

-Nel Noddings, Caring

When you kill the individual you also kill the person.

-Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

To be intellectually responsible is to consider the consequences of a projected step; it means to be willing to adopt these consequences when they follow reasonably from any position already taken. Intellectual responsibility secures integrity; that is to say, consistency and harmony in belief.

-John Dewey, How We Think

To possess all the world of knowledge and lose one’s own self is as awful a fate in education as in religion.
-John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum

A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.

-Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.

-William James, Pragmatism

Punishments inflicted with signs of anger are useless.

-Immanuel Kant, Thoughts on Education