This brief but illuminating passage by George Dennison is a good example of his deep thought and writing. John often said and wrote that The Lives of Children by George Dennison was one of the most moving and insightful books about education he ever read.

“School should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know…”

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis wrote in Schooling in Capitalist America in 1976, ‘“In less than a decade, liberal preeminence in the field of educational theory and policy has been shattered. . . . Today, much of the free school rhetoric has been absorbed into the mainstream of educational thinking as a new wrinkle on how to get kids to work harder.”