Homeschool Quotes

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

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

“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.”
― Ezra Pound

“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, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
― Ivan Illich

“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 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. Menchken

“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

“Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.”
― Charlotte Mason

“[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.
Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and
compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it
instead into meek subservience to authority.”
― Walter Karp

“It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read.”
― Ezra Taft Benson

“[Homeschooling]...recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons.”
― Raymond S. Moore, School Can Wait

“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

“Thank goodness my education was neglected.”
― Beatrix Potter

“Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”
― John Ruskin, The Crown of the Wild Olive. Four Lectures on Industry and War

“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

“Can't you home school me?" Nate pleaded.
"You would never do any work." (Nate's mom)
"Sounds perfect!”
― Brandon Mull, The Candy Shop War

“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

“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

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

“Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and out of mind.”
― Charlotte Mason

“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

“Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.”
― john holt, Learning All the Time

“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

“The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“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

“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