ATX Homeschool > ATX's Quotes

“There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.”
― Gandhi

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
― Sir Walter Scott

“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 worldly success can compensate for failure in the home.”
― David O. McKay

“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

“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., Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who walk with God

“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, The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling

“The home is the chief school of human virtues.”
― William Ellery Channing

“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.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert

“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

“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 Millman, Homeschooling: A Family's Journey

“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

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
― William Butler Yeats

“Allowing children to learn about what interests them is good, but helping them do it in a meaningful, rigorous way is better. Freedom and choice are good, but a life steeped in thinking, learning, and doing is better. It’s not enough to say, “Go, do whatever you like.” To help children become skilled thinkers and learners, to help them become people who make and do, we need a life centered around those experiences. We need to show them how to accomplish the things they want to do. We need to prepare them to make the life they want.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert

“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

“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

“Education is every day and everywhere, the only thing you have to pay is attention.”
― Tim Fargo

“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?”
― Steven James, Placebo

“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

“Homeschool history tells of more than two centuries of home-teaching influence on American education, although it has been largely obscured by the drawn curtains of conventional bias.”
― Raymond S. Moore, School Can Wait

“Successful teaching is not head-to-head; it is heart-to-heart.”
― Tamara L. Chilver

“The process of socialization is nowhere near complete at age five or six, when modern children start spending up to half their waking hours taking their cues from other people's children. Because they accompany their parents' daily routine, homeschooled kids spend plenty of time interacting with people of all ages, which I think most people would agree is a far more natural, organic way to socialize.”
― Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling

“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

“All the homeschooling parents I know meet on a regular basis with other families. They organize field trips, cooking classes, reading clubs and Scout troops. Their children tend to be happy, confident and socially engaged.”
― Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling

“Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon one of the basic postulates of homeschooling: Anything you do with a home-schooled child outside the home can be described as a "field trip", thus rendering whatever activity you pursue a legitimate educational experience.”
― Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling

“More important...you've assembled a curriculum that works for him. It's his education. I suspect he's more likely to have a real education, an education that sticks, if he's part of shaping it.”
― Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling

“It is so exhausting- sometimes even demoralizing- to realize that our work in raising up and teaching our children is never really done. But we must remember that we were never intended to finish it.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“When we talk about homeschooling today, we're amazed at how many people agree that they didn't learn much in school, that school teaches kids to pass the test and move on rather than explore and investigate and inquire...”
― Linda Dobson, The First Year of Homeschooling Your Child: Your Complete Guide to Getting Off to the Right Start

“A graduate can be academically excellent but morally and spiritually bankrupt. We need to consider these dimensions in education as well.”
― John Eidsmoe, God & Caesar: Christian Faith & Political Action

“Had I ever spent the day in our neighborhood public high school as an invisible woman while my children were still enrolled there, I no doubt would have insisted on home schooling.”
― Jeanne Ray, Calling Invisible Women