Homeschooling Quotes

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

John Holt

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher.

John Holt

By educating me at home, my parents were able to give me individualized attention without the usual distractions that kids in regular school experience, like dating and friendship. Not to mention that traditional school can be dangerous. I’ve heard about kids catching the flu and chicken pox, even Judaism.And how about those poor kids lugging all those heavy books to and from school every day? My books never went anywhere, just like me. I felt so bad when I’d see kids on my street giggling and chasing each other around with those awkward backpacks.

So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?

What's the matter?" asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face."Why—why," said Elizabeth Ann, "I don't know what I am at all. If I'm second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?"The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. "you aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in! And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

What's the matter?" asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered fact."Why—why," said Elizabeth Ann, "I don't know what I am at all. If I'm second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?"The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. "you aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in! And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. But I do, and I'll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you're learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you've been leaning on and says, "Now, go it alone!

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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

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.

It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism.

William R. Bowen

Notice the difference: A child’s disability is the focus in traditional classroom settings, but his abilities are the focus in the homeschool environment.

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!

Voddie T. Baucham Jr.

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.

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.

Martine Millman

My best memory of school was probably leaving school. Because I hated that fucking place.

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.

Regarding school vs. homeschoolIf it works, send them there!If it doesn't, don't import it.

Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.

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.

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn  all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

Julia Ward Howe

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.

Sharad Vivek Sagar

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable.

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

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

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

Marilyn Howshall

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.

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

Thank goodness my education was neglected.

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.

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

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

Self-education is the only possible education the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.

Charlotte M. Mason

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

John Maynard Keynes

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

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

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

Ezra Taft Benson

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.

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.

Agatha Christie

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

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

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

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