General happiness

Pam Sorooshian wrote, in a discussion on December 5:

Our goal as unschoolers isn't 'have fun'—that's not ambitious enough. That's good as a goal for a birthday party, but not for parents who have taken the responsibility for helping their children learn. We are aiming for more than that—we are expanding our children's horizons and helping them deepen their understanding of all kinds of things in the world.
. . . .

Learning is intrinsically satisfying and so a child should feel generally satisfied and happy if his/her life involves lots of opportunities for learning. I think general happiness is a good gauge of whether things are going well...but to say that our purpose is to have fun is to vastly understate and mislead about what we're doing.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/pamsorooshian
photo by Sandra Dodd, of the peel of a little orange that came off all in one piece
__