Quotes by Wendy Priesnitz
“Perhaps the most basic assumption our society makes about education is
that learning can and should be produced in people. This assumption
leads to another one: Learning is the result of treatment by an
institution called school.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz“
"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
"Children
don’t need to be taught how to learn; they are born learners. They come
out of the womb interacting with and exploring their
surroundings. Babies are active learners, their burning curiosity
motivating them to learn how the world works. And if they are given a
safe, supportive environment, they will continue to learn hungrily and
naturally – in the manner and at the speed that suits them best."
~ Wendy Priesnitz
"I remember as an only child feeling bored sometimes (at least that is how
it was labeled at the time), especially during summer vacation when my
time wasn’t programmed by somebody else. If my mother noticed, she would
nag at me to “do something”, then she might create some busy work to try
and alleviate my boredom. It seldom worked, possibly because I was
stubborn enough to reject her suggestions on general principle, probably
because she confused solitude with idleness, maybe because you can’t
alleviate somebody else’s boredom for them, and often because I wasn’t
really bored, but tinkering, messing about, just looking like I was
doing nothing. And sometimes, my cries of boredom were really cries for
my mother’s attention, rather than for one of her projects designed to
keep me out of her way. Eventually my down time would end and I would
find something new and more challenging to do than the busy work she
provided. If left alone long enough, boredom motivated me, forced me to
lean on my own inner resources, to develop my imagination and to
envision wonderful possibilities." ~ Wendy Priesnitz
"There
is a line between making something palatable and selling out, and it’s
called greenwash. Greenwash occurs when companies use gorgeous scenes of
pristine nature to divert attention from how they pollute to how they
give money to charity. It happens when a pharmaceutical giant publishes
an ad in a magazine produced by a company trusted by generations of
organic gardeners. For most of us, maturity banishes the need to pose
and preen, to worry about what people think, to be hip to every new
trend. Maturity allows us the wisdom and confidence to cement our
commitments and find joy in family, community, wellness, balance and
sustainability. Let’s hope this “Martha Stewart Goes Organic” stuff
is just an awkward life stage in the transition to a better world, the
brashness of adolescence masking the insecurity that accompanies change."
~ Wendy Priesnitz
“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
“My mother used to take care of me. Now the tables have turned and the child
is parenting the parent. Watching a parent succumb to end-of-life issues
can be painful. It can also be overwhelming, especially for those of us
who have spent our adult lives espousing values around community and
de-institutionalization. In fact, the prospect of moving my 96-year-old
mother into a long-term care home has made me question many aspects of
both my values and the way our society treats its elders. A long-term
care home can be the ultimate in assembly line living, relegating a
person to a thing in storage, which we hope wouldn’t need too much
attention until it’s time to bury the body. Society views aging as a
process of diminishment, so elders enter a new phase of living in a
world that is often uninterested in them as individuals and unreceptive
to their unique gifts and needs. One of the things I’ve learned as I
have struggled with the quality of life issues for my mother is that no
one person can be totally responsible for the care of an elderly person.
It is the responsibility of each of us to see that all elderly people
receive good, appropriate care and are able to die with ease and
dignity. My experience has also shown me that my generation needs to
begin now to create the type of environment we’d like to have when our
time comes. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so it takes a
village to care for the elderly.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz
"In the same way that children in school are ruled and regulated by a group
of friendly “experts,” we are governed by a professional class of
politicians. Instead of self-government, we have a representative
democracy in which the elite have centralized power for their own
benefit, just as power is centralized in school. And that is the way
those in charge like it. It is easier to tell us what is good for us and
sell us something than to have us meddling in education, politics, or
economics. In this kind of democracy, a citizen’s role is not to author
public policy, but merely to influence or comment on it. The object of
political debate in a schooled society is to persuade, in the same way
that a child wheedles and pouts and throws a tantrum in order to get her
way. Because we have never learned to take the initiative to make
change, we resort to criticizing and complaining...or to misbehaving
when the teacher is looking the other way. Many of us have never
experienced the kind of collective power that can be used to build
alternative institutions. Our schooling has led us to misunderstand the
difference between the power to do something and the force that makes us
do something. We were told one too many times to sit in our seats and
listen, to put up our hands when we had to go to the bathroom, and to
buy what we were offered." ~ Wendy Priesnitz
"Personal empowerment begins with realizing
the value of our own life experience and potential to affect the world.
Our children deserve the opportunity to be part of – and learn from –
the daily lives of their families and communities." ~ Wendy Priesnitz
"When I was a young mother, I wore a
t-shirt with the words: 'The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the boat.'
The phrase put a spin on a 19th century poem entitled 'The Hand That
Rocks the Cradle Rules the World' by American poet William Ross Wallace.
I understood at the time that becoming a mother was increasing my desire
to create change in the world, although I didn’t know where that would
lead me. I had already realized that, as the feminist movement espoused,
the personal is political. I had already challenged a few assumptions
about how life was supposed to work – including rejecting both the style
in which I’d been parenting and the institution of school as an
effective vehicle for education. As much as I didn’t like the rules of
the status quo, I also didn’t like labels – even the ones that
accompanied my rebellion. In fact, I’ve fought my whole adult life to
avoid descriptions of myself that involve isms and ists. I dislike being
referred to as an environmentalist, an activist, a feminist, a humanist,
a homeschooler, a radical unschooler, a life learner…although each of
those words describes an aspect of my life and work. School is where we
learn to sort, segment and label in that manner, where knowledge is
broken up into subjects and students are grouped by age and their
ability to perform on tests. And the post-secondary world has turned
segmentation of knowledge into an art. So I suppose I shouldn’t have
been surprised the first time an academic feminist scorned me because of
my advocacy of life learning and its apparent support for the
stay-at-home mom. However, it had never occurred to me that unschooling
and feminism were mutually exclusive. In fact, I am quite certain that
it, in all its label-defying glory, is the ultimate feminist act."
~ Wendy Priesnitz
"Our lack of connection to the natural world allows us to forget our place in Nature,
our dependence on it and the interdependence of all its parts. The
interdependence between natural processes and human ways of living has
been called “ecological literacy” by systems theorist Frijtof Capra and
environmental educator David Orr. Lacking this ecological literacy, we
have created processes and ways of living that are destroying the
ecosystem’s ability to support human life. Increasing our ecological
literacy is allowing us to create the tools to make the transition to
sustainability…providing we also cultivate the will to put the knowledge
into practice." ~ Wendy Priesnitz
"In order to create
the profound transformation that is required in our values, culture and
worldview, I believe we need to examine our attitudes towards
one of
the last oppressed (and seldom recognized as such)
groups in our society: children. We must re-evaluate
not only how we educate them, but how we birth them, nurture their
ability to think creatively and independently, respect their rights,
shape their values, learn from their instinctive kinship with the
natural world and with each other. Those are at the root of the problem,
and that is where we must begin in order to reverse the destructive
momentum of the last few centuries. When we get that right, we will
have, I believe, created both the changes and the hope that will allow
us to proceed with the transformation that is required." ~ Wendy
Priesnitz
