Homeschooling Freethinkers

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. — C.S. Lewis

Do you ever find yourself thinking that you will get a fresh start tomorrow .. or next week? That when things settle down after the holidays, you’ll get down to it? That you just need to get this or that off your plate .. and then you’ll be ready?

Do it today.

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. — Frank Tibolt

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.  — Madeleine L'Engle

One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful. — Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.” — Valedictorian Against Schooling

hat tip: F-Yeah Unschooling

According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next — without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”. — The Art of Slow Reading