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Welcome to these regular musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings by Wendy Priesnitz. Some of my Favorite Quotes “There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by becoming renegades from that culture and planting the seeds for a new one.” ~ Thomas Moore “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” ~ Leonard Cohen “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” ~ Buddha “The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.” ~ Archibald MacLeish “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.” ~ Anna Quinlin “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” ~ Sam Keen “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” ~ May Sarton “Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” ~ Virginia Woolf “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.” ~ E.F. Schumacher “Our mothers are our most direct connection to our history and our gender. Regardless of how well we think they did their job, the void their absence creates in our lives is never completely filled again.” ~ Hope Edelman “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus “Now Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river. And she shows you where to look, among the garbage and the flowers. They are leaning out for love. They will lean that way forever….” ~ Leonard Cohen “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~ Krishnamurti “It takes a long time to grow young.” ~ Pablo Picasso “We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” ~ Sam Keen “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.” ~ Navajo proverb “I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.” ~ Gilda Radner “Do not kiss your children so they will kiss you back but so they will kiss their children, and their children’s children.” ~ Noah ben Shea “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” ~ George Eliot “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” ~ Dr. Seuss “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.” ~ C.S. Lewis “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson “Not all men are like trees; some must travel and cannot keep still.” ~ Romany proverb “I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible; to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing.” Dawna Markova “My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.” ~ Indira Gandhi “There is properly no history; only biography.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” ~ John Lennon “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” ~ Lily Tomlin “The tragedy of life is not death, rather, it is what we allow to die within us while we live.” ~ Norman Cousins “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung “Self-love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us.” ~ Caroline Myss “The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.” ~ Buddha “Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.” ~ P. J. O’Rourke “I feel cluttered when there is no time to analyze experience. That is the still-unexplored experience that literally chokes the mind.” ~ May Sarton “Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.” ~ bell hooks “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.” ~ Marie Curie Learning/Children/Unschooling “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einstein “One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called 'learned incompetency' and a fear of not being able to do things 'right' the first time.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz “I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.” ~ Seymour Papert “All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.” ~ Grace Llewellyn “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.” ~ Frank Zappa “A person’s a person no matter how small.” ~ Dr. Seuss “School is not for learning.” ~ Grace Llewellyn “Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.” ~ Tom Hodgkinson “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~ Pablo Picasso “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” ~ Rachel Carson “If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.”~ C.G. Jung “Public education reflects our society's paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth's resources for granted.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz “Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?” ~ T. S. Eliot “The best function of the school in my head, as it turns out, is to remind me where not to dwell. I did my time in and around school, and learned things painstakingly and grudgingly that my children later learned while laughing and playing and singing.” ~ Sandra Dodd “We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce “When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” ~ Paul Simon “Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.” ~ John Dewey “Because schools suffocate children’s hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz “The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” ~ Bertrand Russell “Like jilted and disappointed lovers, some of my students just want to be left alone.” ~ Kirsten Olson “If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.” ~ Carl Rogers “If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying. ” ~ Coleman Hawkins “As a society, we must own up to the damage we do to our children...in our families and in our schools. We must also be willing to make the sweeping changes in our institutions, public policies and personal lives that are necessary to reverse that harm to our children and to our society.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” ~ Isaac Asimov “Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.” ~ Albert Einstein “College isn't the place to go for ideas.” ~ Helen Keller “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” ~ Albert Einstein “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde “Children do not need us to shape them; they need us to respond to who they are.” ~ Dr. Naomi Aldort “I was fortunate enough to extricate myself before insensibility set in.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore, on quitting school at 13 “Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created ‘dangerous,’ free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.” Laurie A. Couture “What is the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has limits.” ~ Albert Einstein “My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.” ~ Margaret Mead “Some of us are just less damaged than others.” ~ Buckminster Fuller “Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'” ~ Marilyn Ferguson “Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi “The force-feeding process of schooling is so relentless that many students gag on it. They tune out or leave school, and in some cases, become permanently soured on learning.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” ~ Mark Twain “I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.” ~ Agatha Christie “Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy to children.” ~ John Holt “Unschoolers could be seen as the messengers of the dysfunctionality of schools and, like all messengers, should not be shot (or regulated).” ~ Wendy Priesnitz “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.” ~ Albert Einstein “Some people can't leave school because they're carrying it around like a snail and his shell. They live there, still. School became an ingrown, hard part of them. They still define themselves by their school failures and successes.” ~ Sandra Dodd “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ~ William Butler Yeats “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” ~ Beatrix Potter “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” ~ H. L. Mencken “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” ~ Alvin Toffler “It is a miracle that curiosity survives a formal education.” ~ Albert Einstein “When you see a car hurtling toward your child, you push him out of the way before you engage in conversation about Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. We must stop harming the children presently in our care. Right now. Today.” ~ Susan Ohanian “What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.” ~ Henry David Thoreau “Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. “Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.” “And he has Brain.” “Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.” There was a long silence. “I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.” ~ A.A. Milne “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ~ Albert Einstein “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~ Margaret Mead “To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.” ~ Wendell Berry “What is the use of a house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on?” ~ Henry David Thoreau “Be the change you wish to see in the world…” ~ Gandhi “It is not the clay the potter throws that gives the jar its usefulness, but the space within.” ~ Lao-Tzu “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” ~ Rudyard Kipling “Art is a form of the verb to be.” ~ Julia Cameron “Whenever I get somewhere, a poet has been there first.” ~ Sigmund Freud “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” ~ Noam Chomsky “Rather than yearning to be full-time artists, we might aspire to being full-time humans. When we do, art is the overflow of a heart filled with life.” ~ Julia Cameron “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” ~ Michelangelo “You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.” ~ Nietzsche “I’ve been terrified every day of my life but that’s never stopped me from doing everything I wanted to do.” ~ Georgia O’Keefe “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.” ~ Angela Monet Men and Women “MAN is a brand name for male human. Use it and female humans feel left out.” ~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin “Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.” ~ Faith Whittlesey “If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?” ~ Linda Ellerbee “Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.” ~ Katherine Hepburn “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.” ~ Gloria Steinem
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Topics & Passions: natural learning
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