Deb Lewis, on the idea of Unguided Discovery, wrote:
"My son has experienced a lot of wonderful learning through discovery and knows how to find instruction if that's what he wants. I have a wild idea that doing what he wants to do is more important than doing what science educators would like him to do. I don't think all innovators and leaders have to come fromthe molded and stamped process that produced a previous innovator. I think new understanding often comes from fresh and fearless approaches to discovery. So, while some people are working to prove Piaget wrong, I think he had a good idea when he said, 'If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.'"
photo by Sandra Dodd, of a steam calliope
"The idea of unguided discovery in a school setting isn't anything like the kind of discoveries unschooling kids make. There is a difference between a teacher handing a kid a pulley and telling him to discover what it does and write a paper about it and a kid finding an interesting object and messing with it because it sparked his curiosity. A lot of what my son has learned he's learned in a way that might be called unguided discovery, but it didn't look much like the model in the article, and it didn't happen in a vacuum."
