Homeschooling Quotes Quips

ON INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOLING

Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
~ Albert Edward Wiggam

How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
~ Alexandre Dumas

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
~ Anne Sullivan

Homeschooling

Homeschool Curriculum

Great reasons to homeschool your children!
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
~ Lily Tomlin

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
~ Albert Einstein

As Paul Goodman has said, and it cannot be said too often, at the turn of the century, when only six percent of our young even finished high school, and half or less of one percent went to college, the whole country was run by dropouts. But now all roads lead through school. To fail there is to fail everywhere.
~ John Holt

There is more to life than increasing its speed.
~ Gandhi

I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.
~ Thomas Edison

A professor is someone who talks in other people's sleep.
~ Unknown

There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.
~ H. L. Mencken

An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
~ Nicholas Butler

In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
~ Mark Twain

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
~ John Maynard Keyes

By bells and many other similar techniques [schools] teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
~ John Taylor Gatto

Retarded? Disturbed? Attention Deficit? When I read those weak excuses for the schools' failures, I have a definite Belief Deficit.
~ Donn Reed

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
~ H. L. Mencken

When we make our laws and educational policies primarily for the parents who don't care, instead of for those who do, those laws are backwards. We urge that the burden of proof be on the state to show which mothers and fathers are not doing their job.
~ Dr. Raymond Moore

The greatest enemy of the excellent is the good.
~ American Proverb

ON GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF EDUCATION

Great reasons to homeschool the revolution!
It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.
~ Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

A totalitarian state will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.
~ Adolf Hitler

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.
~ Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

What luck for rulers that men do not think.
~ Adolf Hitler

The state will take youth and will give to youth its own education and its own upbringing. Your child already belongs to us... What are you?
~ Adolf Hitler

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
~ Hannah Arendt

The battle for humankind's future must be won in the public schools by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old & the new, the rotting corpse of Christianity with all its adjacent evils & misery, and the new faith.
~ John Dunphy, The Humanist magazine

Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.
~ Melinda Harmon, U.S. Federal Judge, 1996

A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
~ Isabel Patterson, The God of the Machine

The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
~ Aldous Huxley

Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.
~ Edward Fiske

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

ON INDOCTRINATION

Schools are indoctrinating our children.
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
~ Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself - educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.
~ Doris Lessing

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 Underground Grammarian

ON PEER PRESSURE & SOCIALIZATION

Do you really want your children socialized by kids even more immature than they?
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
~ Eric Hoffer

The idea of learning acceptable social skills in a school is as absurd to me as learning nutrition from a grocery store.
~ Lisa Russell

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
~ James Thurber

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What we think about when we are free to think about what we will - that is what we are or will soon become.
~ A.W. Tozer

Fashion is an induced epidemic.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.
~ John Boynton Priestly

They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think.
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three.
~ James Russell Lowe

ON BOREDOM & AMUSEMENT

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
~ Charles Dickens

Boredom . . . The desire for desires.
~ Leo Tolstoy

A man's real worth is determined by what he does when he has nothing to do.
~ Megiddo Message

Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful, or to discover something that is true.
~ William Inge

Boredom is a sickness the cure for which is work; pleasure is only a palliative.
~ Le Duc de Lévis

All things considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
~ Charles-Pierre Baudelaire

ON THE JOY OF LEARNING

Learning... should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the mind of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail.
~ Taylor Caldwell

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
~ John Lubbock

Our generation was not taught how to learn and was never given a love of learning. Yet our children are trained with the same methods that failed to teach us to learn or to love learning. With only the raw material of our fragmented lives to work with, we attempt to integrate our new vision, godly desires, and goals into our old lifestyles and systems. We use the world's methods to try and produce something they were never designed to produce.
~ Marilyn Howshall

Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.
~ Charlotte Mason

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour germinates no more.
~ Henri Amiel

ON CURIOSITY, CREATIVITY, & GENIUS

I have no particular talent, I am merely extremely inquisitive.
~ Albert Einstein

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
~ Jonathan Swift

When the pioneer in science sends forth the groping fingers of his thoughts, he must have a vivid, intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.
~ Max Planck

We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
~ Albert Einstein

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.
~ Jean Piaget

I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.
~ Albert Einstein

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
~ John Taylor Gatto

The truly educated person has only had many doors opened. He knows that life will not be long enough to follow everything through fully.
~ Susan Schaeffer Macauley

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.
~ Albert Einstein

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
~ Jerome S. Bruner

When I examine myself and my method of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
~ Albert Einstein

Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun. ~ George Scialabba

When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.
~ Brian S. Wesbury

ON NONSENSE

To be perpetually talking sense runs out the mind, as perpetually ploughing and taking crops runs out the land. The mind must be manured, and nonsense is very good for the purpose.
~ James Boswell

ON INDIVIDUALITY & SELF-EDUCATION

You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.
~ Marilyn Howshall

Thank goodness my education was neglected.
~ Beatrix Potter

There isn't any known way to bulk-educate; it's all custom work.
~ John Taylor Gatto

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

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
~ Christopher Morley

The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him towards a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor... And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.
~ Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, 'What's your alma mater(school)?' I told him, 'Books.'
~ Malcolm X, on his self-education in prison after an 8th grade public education

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
~ Benjamin Jowett

There's no such thing as a stupid kid, but there are plenty of spurious educational tactics.
~ Richard Schiefelbusch

ON HARD WORK & ACHIEVEMENT

Nothing is stronger than habit.
~ Ovid

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
~ Thomas Edison

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.
~ Theodore Roosevelt

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.
~ Samuel Johnson

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
~ Chinese Proverb

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
~ Thomas Edison, on his failure to achieve a working lightbulb

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent!
~ President Calvin Coolidge

Education is hanging around until you have caught on.
~ Robert Frost

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
~ John Ruskin

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
~ Aristotle

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
~ President Theodore Roosevelt

Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
~ Lance Armstrong

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
~ Sir James Barrie

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more we do,
the more we can do.
~ William Hazlitt

ON MOTIVATION

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'.
A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.
~ John Holt

Nobody rises to low expectations.
~ Calvin Lloyd

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
~ John W. Gardner

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
~ Oscar Wilde

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
~ Walter Bagehot

He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn't know.
~ George Simmel

An orchestra requires men with different talents and, within limits, different tastes; if all men insisted upon playing the trombone, orchestral music would be impossible. Social co-operation, in like manner, requires differences of taste and aptitude, which are less likely to exist if all children are exposed to the same influences than if parental differences are allowed to affect them.
~ Bertrand Russell

ON KNOWLEDGE

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
~ Laurence Sterne

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
~ Anatole France

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
~ Bertrand Russell

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
~ Elbert Green Hubbard

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
~ Daniel J. Boorstin

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
~ John Naisbett

The more I read, the more I meditate; and the more I acquire, the more certain I am that
I know nothing.
~ Voltaire

When Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to the uneducated, he replied, "As much as the living are to the dead."
~ Dionysius of Halicarnassus

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
~ President Thomas Jefferson

The question is not, - how much does the youth know when he has finished his education - but how much does he care and about how many orders of things does he care?
~ Charlotte Mason

No education seems to be worth the name which has not made children at home in the world of books, and so related to them, mind to mind, with thinkers who have dealt with knowledge.
~ Charlotte Mason

ON CRITICAL THINKING

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
~ Voltaire

Learning how to learn is life's most important skill.
~ Tony Buzan

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers

Chance favors the trained mind.
~ Louis Pasteur

When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.
~ Bertrand Russell

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink of it deeply, or taste it not, for shallow thoughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking deeply sobers us again.
~ Alexander Pope

Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt.
~ Robert Lindner

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.
~ Joseph Joubert

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
~ G.K. Chesterton

I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of use in everyday life.
~ Petronius (a.d. 66)

Is it not the great defect of our education today that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning.
~ Dorothy Sayers

ON CRITICAL THINKING WITH GAMES

Games are a great way to develop critical thinking skills!
Games can challenge kids (and you!) to leave stale thoughts behind and open up to a new way of thinking.

ON MATH & SCIENCE

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
~ Fran Lebowitz

Nature-study cultivates the child's imagination, since there are so many wonderful and true stories that he may read with his own eyes, which affect his imagination as much as does fairy lore; at the same time nature-study cultivates in him a perception and a regard for what is true, and the power to express it. All things seem possible in nature; yet this seeming is always guarded by the eager quest of what is true. Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect truth and to express it. Nature-study aids both in discernment and in expression of things as they are.
~ Anna Botsford Comstock

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

A small apparatus well used will do wonders ... Newton rolled up a cover of a book; he put a small glass at one end, and a large brain at the other - it was enough.
~ Maria Mitchell, discoverer of Mitchell's comet

ON LIBERAL & FINE ARTS

Reading, Writing, Art, Music

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.
~ Igor Stravinsky

A faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.
~ Ovid

What is desperately needed . . . is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.
~ Felix Rohatyn

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
~ Mark Twain

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain a perennial child.
~ Cicero

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds.
~ William Ellery Channing

Nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
~ Alberto Moravia

The Universal Law of Reading
First corollary: To read effectively, always sit in a canoe and wear a face mask, snorkel, and flippers.
Second corollary: Don't believe everything you read.
~ Dave Ellis

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
~G. M. Trevelyan

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

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
~ William Godwin

You know, when we are kids we make things up, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some are still writing; the real question is why did the other people stop?
~ William Stafford

You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.
~ Winnie the Pooh

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
~ Erasmus

Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise.
~ Lao-Tzu

Cleverness is not wisdom.
~ Euripedes

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
~ James Thurber

Examine what is said, not him who speaks.
~ Arabian Proverb

Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.
~ David Starr Jordan

To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.
~ President Theodore Roosevelt

Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.
~ President William Howard Taft

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 way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.
~ Mother Teresa

A thing vitally important in my life ... was brought home to me when one of my oldest friends said, "In my house I was a child. In your family's house I was a person."
~ Margaret Mead

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
~ Frederick Douglass

The child's social development is always retarded if the child does not have a single main mother figure constantly about him, ie, a person who has enough time and motherly love for the child. In this sentence, every word is equally important. Single does not mean two, three, or four persons. Constant means always the same person. Motherly means a person who shows all of the behavior toward the child which we designate as "motherly." Main mother figure means that secondary mother figures (father, brothers, sisters, grandparents) may support the main mother figure, but may not substitute for her. Person means that the respective adult has to support the child with his whole being and has to have time for the child.
~ Theodore Helbrügge

We do not need to be told whether to be strict or permissive with our children. What we do need is to have respect for their needs, their feelings, and their individuality, as well as for our own.
~ Rita Nakashima Brock

A house is not a home unless it contains fire and food for the mind as well as the body.
~ Margaret Fuller

Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society.
~ Bertrand Russell

I don't see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the
home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were. The proper relationship of the schools to home is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. It is a supplementary resource.
~ John Holt

ON LIVING LIFE

Life is just what you make it.

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
~ Boris Pasternak

Childhood is not preparation for adulthood - it is a part of life.
~ A. Neill

I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
~ Petronius

We learn not for school, but for life.
~ Seneca

ON MAKING HARD DECISIONS

Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
~ David Lloyd George

It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
~ Anonymous

Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.
~ Pericles

One person with courage makes a majority.
~ Andrew Jackson

Cowardice asks the question: is it safe?
Expediency asks the question: is it politic?
Vanity asks the question: is it popular?
But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular - but one must take it because it's right.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues ... is on the way to totalitarianism and death.
~ Robert M. Hutchins

Never doubt that a group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
~ Margaret Mead

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
~ Samuel Johnson

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
~ Mark Twain

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
~ St. Francis Assisi

The greatest amount of wasted time is the time not getting started.
~ Dawson Trotman

You can't properly socialize children when you homeschool.
Fact: Children who are homeschooled can be well socialized. There are plenty of avenues for socializing with their peers from Scouts to Church organizations. There are a very few homeschoolers who totally isolate themselves - they don't socialize with anyone - the vast majority get out into the real world and socialize with peers as well as people in every age range.

 

 

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