Homeschooling Quotes

“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

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

“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 , Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling

“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

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

“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
― Voddie T. Baucham Jr., Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who walk with God

“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

“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

“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

“You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Peter O. Gray

“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

“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