Homeschooling Quotes
45 quotes
"Education is a system of imposed ignorance."
"There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent."
"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding."
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
"The home is the first and most effective place to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self control, the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home."
"Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature."
"It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read."
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent."
"Thank goodness my education was neglected."
"Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."
"Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. They were not sent away from home each day to a place just for children but lived, learned, worked, and played in the real world, alongside adults and other children of all ages."
"Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us."
"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men."
"The home is the chief school of human virtues."
"We can get too easily bogged down in the academic part of homeschooling, a relatively minor part of the whole, which is to raise competent, caring, literate, happy people."
"It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing."
"As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly."
"Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it."
"You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education."
"When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition."
"There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge."
"Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school."
"This book is not about "homeschooling" at all. School is an artificial institution contrived by man. This book is about educating a child in the heart of the family given to that child by his Creator."
Elizabeth Foss, Real Learning: Education In The Heart Of The Home
"When I look at a child, I see a living, breathing person, made in God's image, for whom God has a plan. As parent educators, we need to embrace a new notion of learning...we need to engage the hearten order to effectively educate the child. Our vision of a well-educated child is a child who has a heart for learning, a child who has the tools he needs to continue to learn for a lifetime and a child who has the love to want to do it."
Elizabeth Foss, Real Learning: Education In The Heart Of The Home
"Children, who once looked to their parents for leadership, now turn to their teachers for knowledge, their peers for wisdom, and their music and televisions for entertainment."
David D'escoto, The Little Book of Big Reasons to Homeschool
"For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them."
"My mother, who taught me how to read and write and home-schooled me for the first 12 years of my life, whose presence shaped me as much as her absence did, who imbibed in me the values of empathy and fearlessness and hard work, looks down on me today with great pride."
"George dutifully dusted the marks from the expensive rug and retired to the kitchen to await a grave and disapproving Collins, wishing with all of his boyish heart that he had applied for the stables. Cleaning stalls had to be beneficial exercise, and surely one must become accustomed to the smells...eventually."
"Regarding school vs. homeschoolIf it works, send them there!If it doesn't, don't import it."
"Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies."
"Education is a system. Learning is an ongoing every day process."
"Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this."
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, 99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child's Classroom
"School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony."
"Education is every day and everywhere, the only thing you have to pay is attention."
"To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking."
"Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work."
"The philosophy of project-based homeschooling — this particular approach to helping children become strong thinkers, learners, and doers — is dependent upon the interest and the enthusiastic participation and leadership of the learners themselves, the children."
"My best memory of school was probably leaving school. Because I hated that fucking place."
"I was delighted to see him growing more cautious and skeptical about what he heard, especially when he heard it from someone in apparent authority. I think that is fundamental to a good education. And if it comes back to bite me from time to time, that's a price worth paying."
"The key is to understand that our children don't belong to us—they belong to God. Our goal as parents must not be limited by our own vision. I am a finite, sinful, selfish man. Why would I want to plan out my children's future when I can entrust them to the infinite, omnipotent, immutable, sovereign Lord of the universe? I don't want to tell God what to do with my children—I want Him to tell me!"
"Notice the difference: A child’s disability is the focus in traditional classroom settings, but his abilities are the focus in the homeschool environment."
Sandra K. Cook, Overcome Your Fear of Homeschooling with Insider Information
"It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism."
William R. Bowen, American Government in Christian Perspective
"Everyone thinks it goes smoothly in everyone else’s house, and theirs is the only place that has problems. I’ll let you in on a secret about teaching: there is no place in the world where it rolls along smoothly without problems. Only in articles and books can that happen."
Ruth Beechick, You Can Teach Your Child Successfully Paperback
"Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, 'What is education for?' If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that's really not your business, and it shouldn't be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you."
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
"Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places."