John Holt and Milicent Shinn

Have started reading How Children Learn. It is essential reading. Check out this quote:

“[Education is] the game of trying to find out how the world works...I’m afraid this is not what most people understand by the word “education”. They understand it as being made to go to a place called school, and there being made to learn something they don’t much want to learn, under the threat that bad things will be done to them if they don’t. Needless to say, most people don’t much like this game, and stop playing as soon as they can.”

He himself quotes Milicent Shinn the first woman to receive a doctorate from the University of California in 1898. She documented the day by day development of her neice and had it published in a psychology journal.
Here she talks about research in children's psychology but to me it eerily mirrors our education system today:

“There is one question I have been asked a thousand times about baby biography: “Doesn’t it do the children some harm? Doesn’t it make them nervous? Doesn’t it make them self-conscious?” At first this seemed to me an odd misapprehension- as if people supposed observing children meant doing something to them. But I have no doubt it could be so foolishly managed as to harm the child. There are thousands of parents who tell anecdotes about their children before their faces every day, and if the parent turns child student [or educational researcher] it is hard to say what he may not do in the way of dissecting a child’s mind openly, questioning the little one about himself, and experimenting with his thoughts and feelings. But such observing is as worthless scientifically as it is bad for the child: the whole value of an observation is gone as soon as the phenomena observed lose simplicity and spontaneity. It should be unnecessary to say that no competent observer tampers with the child in any way...” -Millicent Shinn