All genuine learning is active, not passive. … It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, p. 50]
Education is a seeking, probing, taking-from process, and the initiative must rest with the seeker. As great as is my stake in your better education, I must concede that your progress depends on your desire to learn, that this inquisitiveness into the nature of things is a truly spiritual experience—the spirit of inquiry—that this is wholly volitional and that you are the sole possessor of your volitional stimuli. [Leonard Read, Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market, The Foundation for Economic Education, 1964, pp. 198-203]
No one can be made to learn against his or her will. Learning is a personal choice. Of course, under conditions of compulsion and penalty even the most reluctant learners will grudgingly commit ideas to memory to avoid unpleasant consequences. But the spirit of democratic education requires that students learn willingly. …
Education is personal or it is nothing. …
Some of the more powerful tools for promoting creativity, communication and collaboration ever devised now offer unprecedented opportunities for education to be personalized: to cater for the interests, abilities and learning styles of every student. [Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative, Capstone, 2011, pp. 251-252]
I believe the reason we are here is to learn, which is to say, to evolve. By “evolve” I mean to progress. …
[T]he deliberate choice to learn and grow is primarily one that we make or fail to make as adults. During our childhood, most of our learning is “passive.” … [T]he child may work in certain ways at learning, but generally only because of outside pressure in the form of homework assignments, tests, grades, and expectations at home. …
Mysterious though it is, the choice to actively learn as an adult and devote one’s will consciously to growth and learning is the most crucial decision one ever makes in life. But when is this choice made? Again, the issue has not been scientifically studied the way it should be. … But [the choice] can be made as early as mid-adolescence. [M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety, Simon & Schuster, 1997, pp. 95-106]
The capacity for self-regulation is probably the single most important contributor to achievement, mental health, and social success. The ability to exercise control over what we think, what we feel, and what we do protects against a wide range of psychological disorders, contributes to more satisfying and fulfilling relationships, and facilitates accomplishment in the worlds of school and work. In study after study of adolescents, in samples of young people ranging from privileged suburban youth to destitute inner-city teenagers, those who score high on measures of self-regulation invariably fare best—they get better grades in school, are more popular with their classmates, are less likely to get into trouble, and are less likely to develop emotional problems. This makes developing self-regulation the central task of adolescence, and the goal that we should be pursuing as parents, educators, and health care professionals. [Lawrence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, p. 16]
I consider especially crucial the notion of building up the student’s own sense of responsibility—for learning, for maintaining progress, for devising and carrying out a meaningful network of projects or enterprises, and for making it a natural habit of mind to reflect on her progress. …
The student is asked to bring about change in herself rather than to wait for change to be imposed from the outside (or to believe that change cannot occur at all) and to accept the possibility that assessment may be the burden not of the teacher primarily but of the learner herself. [Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books, 1991, pp. 242-243]
To the extent that students can craft their own goals, keep track of their own accomplishments, reflect on their own thinking and learning—where it has improved, where it continues to fall short—they become partners in their own education. Even more crucially, once formal schooling has concluded, it should have become second nature for adults to keep on learning—sometimes alone, sometimes in groups—for as long as they choose; indeed, one hopes, for the rest of their lives. [Howard Gardner, The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand, 1999, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2021, p. 135]
[T]he salient virtue that most teachers, classical or progressive, have always hoped for in letting the student discover for himself, [is] namely the development of his confidence that he can, that he is adequate to the nature of things, can proceed on his own initiative, and ultimately strike out on an unknown path, where there is no program, and assign his own tasks to himself. The classical maxim of teaching is: to bring the student to where he casts off the teacher. [Paul Goodman, Compulsory Mis-education and The Community of Scholars, Vintage / Random House, 1964, p. 86]
When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name—the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. [Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 1841, Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pocket Books / Washington Square Press, 1965), p. 252]
It is through spontaneous exploration that young people acquire much of their skill, self-confidence, and insights into life’s possibilities. This is one of the key avenues to competence. As they freely explore the world, young people exercise their powers and discover their interests. They learn about people, places, and themselves in profound ways that are unavailable to them in schools and other less “contextualized” settings. [William Damon, Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools, Free Press Paperbacks / Simon & Schuster, 1995, pp. 230-231]
Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.
The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds—a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves. [Alain de Botton et al., The School of Life: An Emotional Education, The School of Life, 2019, p. 1]
We commonly see adolescents and young adults go off to college without having had much of an opportunity to make decisions about the things that matter, including how they want to structure their time, what they want to commit their energy to, or whether they want to be in school at all. Not surprisingly, they have difficulty setting and meeting goals and making good decisions when it comes time to pick classes or a major or more generally to manage their day. [William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, Viking, 2018, p. 61-62]
There is a principal in the human mind by which a man seems to know his own time, and it will sometimes be much better that he should engage in the perusal of books at the period of his own choice, than at the time that you may recollect to put them in his hands. Man is a creature that loves to act from himself; and actions performed in this way, have infinitely more of sound health and vigour in them, than the actions to which he is prompted by a will foreign to his own. [William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, 1797, Garland, 1971, p. 144, https://archive.org/details/enquirerreflecti00godw/page/n3/mode/2up]
[O]ur most rapid, efficient, far-reaching, useful, and permanent learning comes from our doing things that we ourselves have decided to do, and that in doing such things we often need very little help or none at all. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 16]
[Y]ou cannot afford to think of being here to receive an education: you will do much better to think of being here to claim one. One of the dictionary definitions of the verb “to claim” is: to take as the rightful owner; to assert in the face of possible contradiction. “To receive” is to come into possession of: to act as receptacle or container for; to accept as authoritative or true. The difference is that between acting and being acted-upon … [Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education,” speech delivered at Douglass College convocation, 1977, https://www.yorku.ca/cvandaal/files/ClaimingAnEducation.pdf]
The curriculum is not there to be mastered … nor is it there to be experienced … It is there to be chosen. The subject matters and experiences in a curriculum shall be merely available; to be learned, they must first be opted for, sought out, and appropriated by the student. [Van Cleve Morris, Existentialism in Education: What it Means, 1966, Waveland, 1990, pp. 123-124]
It seems that the impression we derive from a book, depends much less upon its real contents, than upon the temper of mind and the preparation with which we read it. [William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature, 1797, Garland, 1971, p. 135, https://archive.org/details/enquirerreflecti00godw/page/n3/mode/2up]
[W]hen burnout occurs it is “almost always an indication that the person’s goals have been externally imposed. Somehow he embarked on his present course because it was expected of him … He was never the authentic source of his choices and consequently they afford little real satisfaction.” [H. J. Freudenberger, Burnout: The High Cost of Achievement, 1980] quoted by [Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, Harvard UP, 1994, p. 171]
In this book I have four goals: to illuminate the meaning and implication of self-responsibility as a way of living and of being in the world; to show that this practice is not an onerous burden but a source of joy and personal power; to establish that we create our selves, shape our identity, through what we are willing to take responsibility for; and to demonstrate that self-responsibility, as well as self-reliance and individualism are essential to the well-being of our society. [Nathaniel Branden, Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life, 1996, Fireside / Simon & Schuster, 1997, p. 16]
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it. Teaching may look like administering a dose, but even a dose must be worked on by the body if it is to cure. Each individual must cure his or her own ignorance. Accordingly, all sound educational theory enjoins individual attention. [Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, Chicago UP, 1991, pp. 35-36]
[I]f our goals are more ambitious—if we want children to make good values their own over the long haul—then there is no substitute for giving them the chance to become actively involved in deciding what kind of people they want to be and what kind of classroom or school they want to have. …
As Constance Kamii has written, “We cannot expect children to accept ready-made values and truths all the way through school, and then suddenly make choices in adulthood.” [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
We have more choices and options than ever before in every area. Frontiers of limitless possibilities now face us in whatever direction we look. To be adaptive in such an environment, to cope appropriately, we have a greater need for personal autonomy … We need to know who we are and to be centered within ourselves. We need to know what matters to us; otherwise it is easy to be swept up and swept along by alien values, pursuing goals that do not nourish who we really are. We must learn to think for ourselves, to cultivate our own resources, and to take responsibility for the choices, values, and actions that shape our lives. We need reality-based self-trust and self-reliance. [Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Bantam, 1994, pp. 23-24]