Schooling: The Hidden Agenda by Daniel Quinn

This article is talk given at a conference, but an interesting read that’s relatively quick compared to a book. He briefly covers some historical, anthropological, and biological theories behind learning and schools.

He asks a great question towards the beginning: “Instead of spending two or three years teaching children things they will inevitably learn anyways, why not teach them some things they will not inevitably learn and that they would actually enjoy learning at this age? How to navigate the stars, for example. How to tan a hide. How to distinguish edible foods from inedible food.”

He observes how children learn in school what is so entrenched in our culture that school is not a necessary means for learning those things. “Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You’d spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is.”

He pushes back against the idea that school reform can ‘fix’ our failing schools, and presents a case that schools are succeeding in what they were designed to do, but no one is willing to acknowledge. He proposes that the extended age required for compulsory education had more to do with historical events like the Great Depression or WWII creating a need to keep young people out of the job market than a need for children to be in school so they could learn more. He compares this with aboriginal societies where by thirteen or fourteen they were often considered adults, fully able to function as such in their societies.

He pushes back against the myth that children must be compelled to learn through schooling, arguing instead that children are biologically motivated to learn, and school has made it a boring and painful experience.

“The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them - the things they need to know - and forget the rest”

You can read it yourself here: https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/daniel_quinn.html

Quinn, D. (2000). Schooling: The hidden agenda a talk given at the Houston unschoolers group family learning conference. Schooling: The Hidden Agenda - The Natural Child Project. https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/daniel_quinn.html