This is the story of a 15 year old boy who built all of the electronics necessary to implement and sustain an FM radio station in his region of Sierra Leone (West Africa). His radio station revolutionized the way his community connected with one another. M.I.T. invited Kelvin to visit for a few weeks to work in their labs, with their students. Please watch the video, then ask yourself a few questions.

What if he weren't a prodigy? What if, instead, he were simply a person who cared about his interests because he saw how they could benefit society, and pursued those interests in the face of inevitable, repetitive setbacks and obstacles. What if we were to stop looking for prodigies, and were to instead start looking for ways to support one another in our interests? What if we then shared those interests with the rest of society? Just imagine what sort of lives children raised in that society would live. I can not provide that for everyone in the world, but I can do my small part to provide that for the people in my life. That is the idea behind unschooling, and why I hold it so dear to my heart.

Jean Piaget

The following is the translation of a speech made by Swiss Developmental Psychologist Jean Piaget. I'll try to post the title of the movie I got it from later.

     "We classify education into two main categories: passive education, relying primarily on memory, and active education, relying on intelligent understanding and discovery. Our real problem is-what is the goal of education? Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what I already know? Or ... should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool are on, throughout life?
     Since we cannot distinguish 'true' from 'false' by the content of memory, it follows that every memory contains an element of reconstruction of the past. The activity of memory is usually presented in terms of code: coding and de-coding. When an event is perceived, just as I perceive this auditorium, a number of perceptions are recorded in code form. Later on, when I think of you in my memory, there is a de-coding.
     The code permits us to organize a memory, from the moment it is recorded until it is evoked. Dr. Inhelder and I posed this problem: is the code of memory invariant? Is it the same at all ages -the same for preschool children as for 10-15 year olds? Or does the code itself change? Our hypothesis is that the code of memory depends on intelligence-on the child's operational level. The code changes from one level to another. It improves, becomes more structured, according to the progress of the child's intelligence."