Unschooling Quotes

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Quotes by Unschoolers

"Homeschooling is not about sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of textbooks all day, recreating school in the isolation of the home.  (Unless, for some reason,  you want it to be.) For many--maybe most--families, homeschooling is about getting out and about. It is about opening to possibilities, about finding learning opportunities around every corner, and about having the 'luxury' of making the kinds of community connections that are sustaining and enjoyable. It is about exploring the world with open eyes and minds, trying new things, going new  places, meeting new people. It is a veritable kaleidoscope of experiences that provide a unique educational path for every child--and parent.  You can find or create anything you want, and have a blast doing it." -Shay Seaborne

Quotes by John Holt

"The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."

"We who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference, are probably no more than one percent of the population, if that. And we are not likely to become the majority in my lifetime. This doesn't trouble me much anymore, as long as this minority keeps on growing. My work is to help it grow."

"What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them."

"I have used the words "home schooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth in the word is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all."

"Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them."

"People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have."

"By nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do - and all we need to do - is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."

"Children are hard-wired to learn."

"The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners."

"What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out."

"To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted."

"To parents I say, above all else, don't let your home become some terrible miniature copy of the school. No lesson plans! No quizzes! No tests! No report cards! Even leaving your kids alone would be better; at least they could figure out some things on their own. Live together, as well as you can; enjoy life together, as much as you can."

"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."

"Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves."

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Comments

[susan]

We are life learners who choose to live without using the public school system. My quote to share is somewhat of a mantra - I use it to help protect our journey when I am feeling the panic and pressures of today's society - - "Value my children's lead and how the day unfolds, find the learning in the experience."

[Yvonne Perkins]

In the words of Alec Bourne , "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated."

[Kim B.]

"Every time you teach a child something, you keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which he discovers for himself will remain with him, visible, for the rest of his life." - Jean Piaget