Unschool Quotes

“Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, 99 Questions and Answers About Unschooling

“Our parents never structured our studies. "Let 'em learn what they like," my father used to say. "A child will eat a well-balanced diet if she's given a choice of wholesome foods and left alone. If a kid's body knows what it needs to grow and stay healthy, why wouldn't her mind, too?"

To his friends he explained, "My girls have free run of the forest and public library. They have a mother who is around to fix them lunch and define any words don't know. School would only get in the way of that. Besides, if they went to school, they'd spend over two hours a day in the car. Lord knows I could use the company on those drives, but it's better for my kids to stay in the woods."

So while other children were reciting their times tables and asking permission to get drinks of water, Eva and I were free to roam and learn as we pleased. Together we painted murals and made up plays, built forts, raised butterflies, and designed computer games. We made paper, concocted new recipes for cookies, edited newsletters, and caught minnows. We grew gourds and nursed fledglings and played with prisms, and our parents told the state that what we did was school.

For years I studied what I wanted to, when and how I wanted to study it. One book led to another in a random pattern, meandering from interest to interest like a good conversation, and the only thing that connected them was their juxtaposition on the bookshelves in mother's workroom.”
― Jean Hegland, Into the Forest

“The simplest description is that Unschooling means a way of bringing up children using free play and child-directed activity to develop the child's own individual talents and creativity by supportively following up the child's own interests – without coercion, compulsion, manipulation, regimentation, constant testing and grading and rank-ordering, or top-down authoritarianism.”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, 99 Questions and Answers About Unschooling

“Labels are OK for marketing something, but does the Unschooling philosophy of life need any marketing? No. In so many ways, Unschooling stands for a refusal of marketing and a rejection of any consumerist approach to learning.

Your learning IS your life, not something you purchase subject by subject in the big education supermarket to hang on the wall like a diploma or certificate. Unschooling by its nature does not need to set up an 'Institute of Unschooling' or an 'Unschooling Foundation': that would be the purest contradiction-in-terms, to institutionalize the very practice that most undermines institutionalization!”
― Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, 99 Questions and Answers About Unschooling