Enjoy listening to Matt Beaudreau (founder of Acton Academy Placer) as he talks about life, learning, relationships, critical thinking, adaptability, wonder, and the healthy habit of facing your dragons, and what all this might mean as a young learner in a community-oriented, self-directed, and curiosity-driven learning landscape. Visit his Acton Academy Placer here: https://www.actonplacer.com/ See his "The Essential 11" podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL1KcYujlcZBejXj8zmUj1w ______ Landing page to learn more about founding an Acton Academy, or to learn more about it's original founders (Laura and Jeff Sandefer): https://www.launchactonacademy.com/about ______ Seth Godin's "Stop Stealing Dreams (What is school for?)" (pdf): https://seths.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/stop-stealing-dreams6print.pdf Ken Robinson's "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" (TED Talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY John Taylor Gatto's "The Purpose of Schooling" (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4eYRPjfGYQ "FINDING JOE: A story about Joseph Campbell and The Hero's Journey." (Documentary on YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8nFACrLxr0 ______ "When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else." ~Joseph Campbell "The need for education should manifest itself like hunger." ~Leo Tolstoy" How to live your life is the only real knowledge." ~Leo Tolstoy "The attempt to steer a person can make it hard for them to move, because it inactivates their own guidance system." ~Ray Peat "Knowledge does not keep any better than fish." (The Aims of Education, 1929)~Alfred North Whitehead "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him [or her] to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." ~Friedrich Nietzsche "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." ~John Dewey "You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo—a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train—a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man—the scared-to-death conformist." ~A.S. Neill "I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest." ~A.S. Neill "Most children are curious, they want to know; but their eager inquiry is dulled by our pontifical assertions, our superior impatience and our casual brushing aside of their curiosity. We do not encourage their inquiry, for we are rather apprehensive of what may be asked of us; we do not foster their discontent, for we ourselves have ceased to question. Most parents and teachers are afraid of discontent because it is disturbing to all forms of security, and so they encourage the young to overcome it through safe jobs, inheritance, marriage and the consolation of religious dogmas. Elders, knowing only too well the many ways of blunting the mind and the heart, proceed to make the child as dull as they are by impressing upon them the authorities, traditions and beliefs which they themselves have accepted. Only by encouraging the child to question the book, whatever it be, to inquire into the validity of the existing social values, traditions, forms of government, religious beliefs and so on, can the educator and the parents hope to awaken and sustain his [or her] critical alertness and keen insight." ~Jiddu Krishnamurti