Student Freedom Quotes

I was lucky enough to go to a school which gave flexibility around education and sport. We had a 1-hour, 30-minute lunch break, and were able to train during this time.

We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that.

An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

Let students use technologies in the classroom.

Children are there to go to school and I absolutely support their rights to have views about the world and I absolutely support them expressing themselves, but not during school.

They, students have a degree of freedom that nobody else has.

Students typically are at a period of their lives when they're more free than at any other time. They're out of parental control. They're not yet burdened by the needs of trying to put food on the table in a pretty repressive environment, often, and they're free to explore, to create, to invent, to act, and to organize. Over and over through the years, student activism has been extremely significant in initiating and galvanizing major changes. I don't see any reason for that to change.

Educators are still spending way too much time trying to control what kids learn, bending the content to their own purposes, hoping beyond hope to change - by using technology - but not change too much.