Quotes About Unschooling

#1. John Taylor Gatto's extraordinary book, Dumbing Us Down. Check out Mary Griffith's The Unschooling Handbook and Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Take a look at Home Education Magazine and its website.

Daniel H. Pink

#2. When you get down to it, unschooling is really just a fancy term for 'life' or 'growing up uninstitutionalized'.

Grace Llewellyn

#3. For those orderly folks who have life all neatly arranged in their heads, who do more accepting than questioning, unschooling is a disturbing thing.

Sandra Dodd

#4. The primary difference I see is that unschooling is an invitation to awaken and ennoble capabilities that exist within the child. Where traditional schooling is to fill the child with facts that we, as a collective have decided upon.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

#5. Unschooling is creating an environment in which children can learn easily and naturally all the time.

Sandra Dodd

#6. However, unschooling doesn't imply that a child doesn't take classes or participate in structured learning activities. It means that we, the parents, don't attempt to make our children learn by giving assignments or otherwise manipulating or threatening them into learning and doing things.

Sara McGrath

#7. 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

#8. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.

Albert Camus

#9. I don't know anyone, from any class, who's had a perfectly easy life. I've met people born into wealthy families who feel like they didn't have much emotional support, and people who come from working-class families who had loads of love but no money.

Paloma Faith

#10. Your goal, after enough of these customer conversations, is to be able to stand up in front of your company and say, Here were our hypotheses about our customers, their problems, and how they worked. Now here's what they're saying their issues really are, and this is how they really spend their day.

Steven Gary Blank

#11. I have received delegations of working men who come, apparently speaking of the utmost sincerity, have declared that they would regard it as a genuine hardship to be deprived of their beer.

Woodrow Wilson

#12. Learning and education are a normal part of everyday life and do not need a vast expensive bureaucracy to force them to happen.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

#13. Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Of course you cannot keep a wife-
Everyone's got to live their life!

Kristen McKee

#14. If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself

A.S. Neill

#15. Either you came in here a swimmer or you'd better be a really fast learner

Suzanne Collins

#16. Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

John Holt

#17. School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.

John Taylor Gatto

#18. Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

William Blake

#19. The water was a full unknowable world.

Lewis Robinson

#20. I could have been hanging out with my friends, but most of them were hanging out with their families or their Wiis. (Wiis? Wiii? What is the plural?)

David Levithan

#21. Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

George Santayana

#22. My success or failure in school was dependent on my ability to follow a curriculum that felt as if it had very little to do with me as a human being.

Ben Hewitt

#23. Rock-a-bye Baby
In the tree top
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
And Mama will catch you
Cradle and all!

Kristen McKee

#24. Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

#25. Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship.

John Ralston Saul

#26. When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time - not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.

Colin Firth

#27. The philosophy of project-based homeschooling - this particular approach to helping children become strong thinkers, learners, and doers - is dependent upon the interest and the enthusiastic participation and leadership of the learners themselves, the children.

Lori McWilliam Pickert

#28. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.

Charles Stross

#29. Read on and I will tell you what to do in the future to avoid getting smashed and find yourself with nothing but little pieces of drift floating around in the ship's wake.

John W. Trimmer

#30. For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.

Anthony M. Esolen

#31. Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are.

John Holt

#32. Many of the world's greatest geniuses all had in common that they were pulled from the school environment. They were freed to discover the undiscovered. They had the imagination to 'see' a different way and the drive to try to build what they had seen.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

#33. There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was "bad",
Her Papa loved her anyway.

Kristen McKee

#34. The letter K was the first one in the alphabet which had not, with more or less justification, been used to designate other vitamins, and it also happened to be the first letter in the word 'koagulation' according to the Scandinavian and German spelling.

Henrik Dam

#35. They say you shouldn't equivocate; They say you should be direct and firm. They say that's "no" is one-word sentence. They say to use it with force.. They say you should never elaborate on "no".

Claire Kendal

#36. Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun!

Kristen McKee

#37. To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on - not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.

Lori McWilliam Pickert

#38. I always like to learn, but I don't always like to be taught.

Winston Churchill

#39. I've been able to do a lot of interesting things.

Stephen Root

#40. Of all the things I have learned since becoming a parent(and sometimes, it feels as if this might be everything I've learned), perhaps the hardest to accept is that it is selfish and possibly even dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children.

Ben Hewitt

#41. The belief that young people are incapable of making reasonable decisions is a cornerstone of our system of compulsory, closely monitored education.

Peter O. Gray