Unschooling Quotes

“The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position.” ~ Leo Buscaglia

“I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.” ~ Dolly Parton.

“I feel to warn you that one of the chief means of misleading our youth and destroying the family unit is our educational institutions.” ~ Ezra Taft Benson, [The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, P. 307]

“Institutionalized school has taught us to seek answers in order to get the lesson over with rather than to inspire more questions and extend the curiosity of the students.” ~ Leigh Bortins [The Question]

“If you manipulate, coerce, and bully your children, you will have no power at all. If you lead with humility, gentleness, and by example, you will need no power at all.” ~ William Martin

“The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings and actions of students.” ~ Professor Benjamin Bloom [called “Father of Outcome-Based Education” (OBE)]

“Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except… the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.” ~ Floyd Dell

“Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.” ~ John Adams

“A native of America who cannot read or write is . . . as rare as a comet or an earthquake.” ~ John Adams

“Confidence is the foundation of all learning.” ~ Dr. Tovah Klein, Ph.D

“Confidence doesn’t say ‘They will like me.’ Confidence says, ‘I’ll be fine if they don’t.’” ~ Unknown

“Why should we worry about what others think of us, do we have more confidence in their opinions than we do our own?” ~ Brigham Young

“Many well-behaved children are not truly self-regulated; they are afraid.” ~ Iris Chen [Untigering]

“I believe that one is only truly free when one is learning, and one can only learn when one is free.” ~ Peter Fonda

“People are starting to realize that public education in America was designed for the masses of poor, and its intent has been to trap poor people into being workers and servants. If you don’t want that for your children, then you look for something else” ~ Nikita Bush (Former public school teacher)

“Children can be conditioned to respond to coercion or connection. Whichever way you choose to lead, your child will respond to. Humans instinctively rebel against coercion but are drawn to connection. Choose your influence wisely.” ~ Lelia Schott

“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” ~ Stephen Covey

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child." ~ Tom Stoppard, [The Coast of Utopia]

“Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.” ~ U. G. Krishnamurti

“To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a “Natural Man”.” ~ U.G. Krishnamurti, [The Mystique of Enlightenment: The Radical Ideas of U.G. Krishnamurti]

“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti, [Education and the Significance of Life]

“The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

“There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die is a process of learning.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Don’t question your ability to teach your child. Question putting your child into the same institution that left you questioning your ability to teach your child.”

“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” ~ Robert Brault

“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.” ~ John Dryden

“We become what we think about.” ~ Earl Nightingale

“The mind is everything. What you think, you become.” ~ Buddha

“No one outside ourselves can rule us inwardly. When we know this, we become free.” ~ Buddha

“To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.” ~ Buddha

“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.” ~ Thomas Merton

“Powerful people cannot afford to educate the people that they oppress." ~ Dr. John Henrik Clarke

“The opposite of play is not work – the opposite of play is depression.” ~ Dr. Stuart Brown

“Smart people don’t learn…because they have too much invested in proving what they know and avoiding being seen as not knowing.” ~ Professor Chris Argyris, Harvard Business School

“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” ~ Zig Ziglar

“Some learn by reading. Others learn by observation. The rest of us have to pee on the electric fence.” ~ Will Rogers

“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astonish ourselves.” ~ Thomas Edison

“Productive learning is where the process engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more. Absent wanting to learn, the learning context is unproductive.” ~ Seymour Sarason

“After all is said and done, more is usually said than done.”

“The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home.” ~ William Temple

“The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.” ~ John Updike

“All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.” ~ Frédéric Bastiat

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” ~ Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor (121 -180 AD)

“Schooling not only destroys our passion for life, it also never allows us to know it exists. As children we have no choice but to place trust in our culture to meet our needs. We do what it dictates, expecting to learn how to live in the world. Placed in school, with a one-size-fits-all curriculum, we do not learn to follow the things in life that interest us and give us power as individuals.” ~ Urban Scout, Rewild or Die

“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.” ~ Richard Branson

“Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water.” ~ Henry Miller

“I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” ~ Eartha Kitt

"Learning is pulling in knowledge that a child finds useful.
Teaching is pushing towards a child knowledge that the teacher wants the child to have." ~ Joyce Fetteroll

“Learning occurs naturally, but teaching isn’t natural at all. The little ones are learning from the older children or from the adults, but nobody’s teaching. They’re learning on their own initiative, which is so powerful. You don’t have to augment it. In fact, you can’t really augment it. There’s no way you can make a child learn better than he would if he or she wants to.” ~ Jean Leidloff

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” ~ Les Brown

“Create your own reality by choosing your future.” ~ Les Brown

“The best thing that you can have for a child is him to be born into poverty.” ~ Andrew Carnegie, Most successful entrepreneur of all time (Billionaire Dan Pena agrees)

“If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.” ~ Coleman Hawkins

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.” ~ R.D. Laing

“It is an exacting and exhausting business, this damming up the flood of human potentialities. What energy it takes to make a torrent into a trickle, to train that trickle along narrow, well marked channels!” ~ George Leonard

“Cause and effect is the basis of my education, leading me to an essence far more profound than any rule of societal conditioning.” ~ KA Chinery

“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. Learning is an ongoing every day process.” ~ Mommy Moo Moo

“If you have a high school diploma…and can walk and talk…you can graduate from college” ~ Jerome Murphy, Dean of Harvard’s School of Education , 1998

“I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.” ~ L. Frank Baum

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~ H. Jackson Brown Jr., [P.S. I Love You]

“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” ~ Friedrich Hegel

“There were no sex classes. No friendship classes. No classes on how to navigate a bureaucracy, build an organization, raise money, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what was important to me. Not knowing how to do these things is what messes people up in life, not whether they know algebra or can analyze literature.” ~ William Upski Wimsatt

“Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.” ~ Alfie Kohn

"Children allowed to develop at their own speed will usually win the race of life.‘’ ~ Fred O. Gosman (20th century), U.S. author. How to Be a Happy Parent . . . in Spite of Your Children, ch. 2 (1995).

“Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.” ~ Bruce Lee

“It’s exciting to see how fast your kids learn and grow. I’m not too worried about them, particularly the ones who like to break rules and don’t follow instructions; those are the ones that will do just fine because they know what’s important to them.” ~ Michael Dell

“I exclusively attended public school… And I can honestly say that on the day of my graduation, if you had given me a pop quiz on history, science, or math, I would have in no way been able to pass it – despite the fact that I completely understood it at the time that it had been ‘taught’ to me, and had even made a good ‘grade’ on it.” ~ Jessica Bowman

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” ~ Paulo Freire

“The freedom to make mistakes provides the best environment for creativity. Education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” ~ Anatole France

“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." ~ John W. Gardner

“Your best teacher is your last mistake.” ~ Ralph Nader

“The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.” ~ Adam Smith

“Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.” ~ Thomas Hodgskin

“When Students cheat on exams it’s because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I am unable to accept the idea that I should be an obedient subject of a gang of corrupt, unprincipled thugs who pontificate about freedom while enslaving the population.” ~ John Pugsley

“Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.” ~ Rosalie Gordon, What Happened to Our Schools?’ book (1956)

“Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” ~ Ellwood Patterson Cubberley [“Public School Administration: A Statement of the Fundamental Principles Underlying the Organization and Administration of Public Education”, 1916]

“… to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself.” ~ Werner Erhard

“Become who you are by learning who you are.” ~ Greek poet Pindar

“Life is a daily battle with people and things that are trying to change us and those that are trying to prevent us from changing.” ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Schooling is a manufacturing process whereby the raw material called curious boys is turned into products called obedient men.” ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The problem is not that public schools do not work well, but rather that they do. The first goal and primary function of schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we normally label state indoctrination.” ~ Wendy McElroy

“Millions of years of evolution have created children who love to learn on their own – it’s how nature has ensured our survival. Humankind has eaten from the tree of knowledge and continues to seek out this delicious fruit from the first moments of life – no force-feeding is necessary.” ~ Kathy Hirsch-Pasek & Roberta Michnick Golinkoff (2003, 21)

“The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence.” ~ Rosamunde Pilcher

“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

“If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself” ~ A.S. Neill

“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.” ~ Fred Rogers, [You Are Special: Neighborly Wit And Wisdom From Mister Rogers]

“There needs to be a lot more emphasis on what a child CAN do, instead of what they cannot do.” ~ Temple Grandin

“Only when someone refuses to do certain things will they be capable of doing great things.” ~ Mencius

“Someone who day by day gains awareness of his deficiencies, and month by month doesn’t forget what he has become proficient in, can really be called a lover of learning.” ~ Tzu Hsia

“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

“There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.” ~ John Locke

“We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that they are someone today.” ~ Stacia Tauscher

“Money doesn’t bring happiness and creativity. Your creativity and happiness brings money.” ~ Sam Rosen

"The harder I work, the luckier I am” ~ Thomas Jefferson

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” ~ John F. Kennedy

“It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.” ~ Ann Landers

“The only skill that will be important in the 21st century is the skill of learning new skills. Everything else will become obsolete over time.” ~ Peter Drucker

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ~ Alvin Toffler

“Children live what they learn & learn what they live.” ~ Amish Proverb

“Learn to like what doesn’t cost much.
Learn to like reading, conversation, music.
Learn to like plain food, plain service, plain cooking.
Learn to like fields, trees, brooks, hiking, rowing, climbing hills.
Learn to like people, even though some of them may be different…different from you.
Learn to like to work and enjoy the satisfaction doing your job as well as it can be done.
Learn to like the song of birds, the companionship of dogs.
Learn to like gardening, puttering around the house, and fixing things.
Learn to like the sunrise and sunset, the beating of rain on the roof and windows, and the gentle fall of snow on a winter day.
Learn to keep your wants simple and refuse to be controlled by the likes and dislikes of others.” ~ Lowell Bennion

“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat dies nobly.” ~ Arnold Edinborough

“Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.” ~ Napoleon Hill