Throwing Marshmallows quote
falsely claimed, credit restored.


If anyone finds this quote attributed to Barbara Lamping, please send this page
and ask them to credit the quote properly to Katrina Gutleben. Thanks!

In the late 90's or early 2000s, when people tended toward e-mail nicknames online, someone wrote something that was copied and pasted and eventually got out as "anonymous.

Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he’s not interested, it’s like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.

In 2005, a site was created called throwingmarshmallows.com, with the quote marked "anonymous." Someone named Barbara Lamping came along and said "That's my quote." And she created a site with that quote and her name, but I had never heard of her, and there was no evidence that she was an unschooler. I remembered the original quote being right there, new, but I couldn't remember who had said it.

I asked other unschoolers, and someone said it had been "katguts"—a nickname for Katrina Gutleben—on the Unschooling.com message board (the old one, dismantled by then). This was confirmed, and I wrote to the owner of Throwing Marshmallows (left a comment, sometime in 2010) and pointed out that Parenting a Free Child (Kream, 2005) credited Katrina Gutleben.

She changed the citation and left an explanation that has links no longer leading to the documentation.

I had seen the quote misattributed the year before and written the letter below:

From: [email protected]
Subject: problem: Quote of the week about marshmallows
Date: March 4, 2009 10:12:14 AM MST
To: [email protected]

-=-"Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating." - Barbara Lamping =-

This is not her quote. I collected evidence and reports and hadn't finished the followthrough, yet, but that quote is NOT Barbara Lampings. Please don't include it on your site collection. Even though the e-mail has gone out, please don't leave it as yet another public mis-attribution.

I feel really bad now that I hadn't completed my project. I had the word out for Barbara Lamping to contact me, but she hadn't. When she did I was going to straighten it up on several sites at once, one being one that Barbara Lamping has which seems to exist wholly to take credit for that quote and maybe make some money from homeschoolers who stop by. There's no content.

The quote is from Katrina Gutleben (katguts) on the unschooling.info message boards when those were active. It's quoted in Rue Kream's book Parenting a Free Child.

I remember the statement being new, in a discussion of teaching and learning, and "katguts" was a regular contributor to those discussions. I don't know who Barbara Lampings is, but was willing to accept that she might have been someone in those discussions, if she could tell me her screenname.

Sandra

If anyone finds this quote attributed to Barbara Lamping, please send this page and ask them to credit the quote properly to Katrina Gutleben. Thanks!

The blog owner's e-mail from the time she switched the citation:

From: Stephanie Elms
Subject: Throwing Marshmallows Quote
Date: April 23, 2010 8:34:56 AM MDT
To: [email protected]

Hi Sandra. Thanks for looking into this. I do remember katgut from the unschooling.com boards. Barbara Lamping emailed me a couple of years ago asking to have it attributed to her. I honestly did not remember who had said it, so I took her at her word.

Please let me know if you find out anything. The email that I was able to find is [email protected].

Stephanie