The education system will never care about your education.
“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
“If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn’t learn to walk without going to school.” ~ Geoffrey D. Graham
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.” ~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte
“The child himself is the curriculum.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
“The doer alone learneth.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
“When you really pay attention, everything is your teacher.” ~ Unknown
“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.” ~ Sir Walter Scott
“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.” ~ Seneca
“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.” ~ Fred Rogers
“The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.” ~ Brian Herbert, [House Harkonnen]
“What we call education is nothing but domestication of the human being.” ~ Don Miguel Ruiz
“So many “learning disabilities” are in fact styles of self-directed learning that are not fully appreciated.” ~ Yaakov Mintz
“There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom.” ~ Joao Coutinho
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
“I think self-education is the greatest and best thing you could ever make.” ~ Tony Robbins
“You keep on learning and learning, and pretty soon you learn something no one has learned before.” ~ Richard Feynman
“Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created ‘dangerous,’ free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.” ~ Laurie A. Couture
“What the majority of American children need is to stop being pampered, stop being indulged, stop being chauffeured, stop being catered too. In the final analysis, it is not what you do for you children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.” ~ Ann Landers
“How does he achieve this independence? He does it by means of a continuous activity. How does he become free? By means of constant effort. …we know that development results from activity. The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.” ~ (The Absorbent Mind)
“There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified “educations” is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An “education” that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must “teach” by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.“ ~ Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
“Learning is the human activity that least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful activity." ~ Ivan Illich
“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.” ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert
“Our job is obvious: we need to get out of the way, shine a light, and empower a new generation to teach itself and to go further and faster than any generation ever has.” ~ Seth Godin
"What we are merely taught seldom nourishes the mind like that which we teach ourselves.” ~ Carter G. Woodson
“None of the world’s problems will have a solution until the world’s individuals become thoroughly self-educated.” ~ Buckminster Fuller
“Victory comes from finding opportunities in problems.” ~ Sun Tzu
“Listen to the desires of your children. Encourage them and then give them the autonomy to make their own decision.” ~ Denis Waitley
“Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.” ~ Anne Sullivan Macy
“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” ~ Plato
“Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
“When we have children who learn different, think different, are wired differently, and when our focus (as parents) is on recognizing and embracing who that child is and to help them as they are, then unschooling fits perfectly.” ~ Shannon Stoltz
“A child knows what she wants and needs to know right now, what her mind is ready and hungry for. If we try to make her learn something else that we think is more important, chances are that she won’t learn it, that she will soon forget most of what she learned and - worst of all - will before long lose most of her appetite for learning anything.” ~ John Holt
"Self-education through play and exploration requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time—time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures. That time is needed to make friends, play with ideas and materials, experience and overcome boredom, learn from one’s own mistakes, and develop passions.” ~ Peter Gray [Free to Learn]
“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself…the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. …And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.” ~ Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794, English historian
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” ~ Jim Rohn
“No one is ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion, which arouses the internal teacher, who helps us to understand things.” ~ Swami Vivekananda
“Few things are more important than learning how to learn.” ~ Richie Norton
“Only the educated are free.” ~ Epictetus
“The height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment…he who cannot establish a dominion over himself will have no dominion over others. He who masters himself shall be a king.” ~ Spencer W Kimball
“The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
“Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a three-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box.” ~ Daniel Pink
“You can’t really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.” ~ Dave Cullen
“It is impossible for one human being to educate another. You cannot educate a child, you can only inspire a child to educate himself or herself.” ~ Oliver DeMille
“Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.” ~ Aristotle
“Self-education is lifelong curiosity.” ~ Lailah Gifty Akita, [Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind]
“What you love to do, you will learn to do well.” ~ Japanese Proverb
“When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” ~ Jean Piaget
“There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.” ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson
“Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.” ~ Ernest Dimnet
If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you. ~ Zig Ziglar, 1926-2012, American self-help writer
“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” ~ Robert Maynard Hutchins
“A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.” ~ Founder of pioneering democratic free school Summerhill, A.S. Neill, wrote in his 1960 book
“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.” ~ Carl Rogers
“Schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it’s appropriate ‘morsel’ and ‘shock.’ And when this method doesn’t work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children – something they must try to diagnose and treat.” ~ John Holt
“It’s not so much what children learn through play, but what they won’t learn if we don’t give them the chance to play. Many functional skills like literacy and arithmetic can be learned either through play or through instruction – the issue is the amount of stress on the child. However, many coping skills like compassion, self-regulation, self-confidence, the habit of active engagement, and the motivation to learn and be literate cannot be instructed. They can only be learned through self-directed experience (i.e. play)." ~ Susan J. Oliver
“The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
