Homeschooling Quotes

We want our children to become who they are--- and a developed person is, above all, free. But freedom as we define it doesn't mean doing what you want. Freedom means the ability to make choices that are good for you. It is the power to choose to become what you are capable of becoming, to develop your unique potential by making choices that turn possibility into reality. It is the ability to make choices that actualize you. As often as not, maybe more often than not, this kind of freedom means doing what you do not want, doing what is uncomfortable or tiring or boring or annoying.

~ Gregory J. Millman

There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge.

~ Christopher Langan

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

~ Noam Chomsky

There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. Leadership qualities are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.

~ John Holt

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.

~ Agatha Christie

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.

~ Ezra Pound

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

~ H.l. Mencken

It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read.

~ Ezra Taft Benson

The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best

~ A.s. Neill

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

~ Ivan Illich

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.

~ David O. Mckay

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

~ John Maynard Keynes

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

~ John Ruskin

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.

~ Thomas Moore

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

~ Roger Lewin

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.

~ John Holt

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.

~ John Taylor Gatto

The home is the chief school of human virtues.

~ William Ellery Channing

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

~ G.k. Chesterton

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.

~ Plato

Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school environment, the teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn.

~ Gene Royer

Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.

~ Richard Mitchell

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.

~ John Holt

Thank goodness my education was neglected.

~ Beatrix Potter

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.

~ James Beattie

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.

~ John Holt

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.

~ Diane Flynn Keith

You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.

~ Marilyn Howshall

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.

~ Rachel Gathercole

When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable.

~ Elizabeth Foss

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.

~ William Howard Taft

When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.

~ Brian S. Wesbury

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

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

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

~ John W. Gardner

To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

~ Wendy Priesnitz

Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.

~ Edward Fiske

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

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.

~ Anthony M. Esolen