My Favorite Unschooling Quotes

“Forced association is not socialization.”

~ Adele Carroll

“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.”

~ Alec Bourne

“I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.”

~ Aleister Crowley

“How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.”

~ Alexandre Dumas

“It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child’s curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.” ~ Alice Miller

“We don’t yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.”

~ Alice Miller

“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”

~ Anna Freud

“Everything I am interested in, from cooking to electronics, is related to math. In real life you don’t have to worry about integrating math into other subjects. In real life, math already is integrated into everything else.”

~ Anna Hoffstrom

“It is… 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; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” -Albert Einstein

“I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be.” ~Albert Einstein

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” ~ Albert Einstein

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

~ Albert Einstein

“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

“Education with inert ideas is not only useless, it is above all things harmful.”

~ A. N. Whitehead

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”

~ Arthur Koestler

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”

~ Beatrix Potter

“Children learn how to speak by listening to others speak. They learn how to converse by watching and listening to others converse. They learn how to hold books by watching other people hold books.”

~ Becca Challman

“Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.”

~ Bell hooks

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”

~ Bertrand Russell

“Life-long learners start their education at home.”

~ Beverley Paine

‎”Today for Show and Tell, I’ve brought a tiny marvel of nature: a single snowflake. I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water, just like every other one, when you bring it in the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I’ll be leaving you drips and going outside.”

~ Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes comic

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.”

~ Carl Rogers

“If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.”

~ C.G. Jung

“I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.”

~ Claude Monet

“The educational system in our country today is the most un-American institution we have in our midst.”

~ Daniel Greenberg

“My job is not to teach at all, but to find the opportunities for my kids to learn. NOT knowing something can be an advantage, as it reminds me of the wealth of resources out there in the community and world, if only we are willing to go look for them.” ~ David Albert

“Think of reading like riding a bicycle: One doesn’t consciously name the muscles involved or the particular actions required of each, or the parts of the bicycle, or Newton’s laws of motion, or the physics of gears, or the changes in brain chemistry associated with balance. One gets up on the seat and starts to pedal.”

~ David Albert

“Homeschooling is an act of liberation and an act of passion. It is an occasion to walk away from institutional images of life and to embrace a vision that is filled with personal meaning and unmistakable truths for our families. The quality of awareness that comes from the heart is more dependable… Homeschooling… is about helping make it possible for children to reach maturity with healthy, curious, fully conscious minds.”

~ Earl Gary Stevens

“Public school–where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.”

~ Emma Goldman

“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

~ Eric Hoffer

“I loved learning, it was school I hated. I used to cut school to go learn something.”

~ Eric Jensen

“As far as I have seen, at school…they aimed at blotting out one’s individuality.”

~ Franz Kafka

“Education: free and compulsory – what a way to learn logic!”

~ Frank van Dun

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.”

~ Frank Zappa

“What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”

~ George Bernard Shaw

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”

~ George Santayana

“Why have kids just to get rid of them? I’m opposed to the whole nonsense.”

~ Gomez Addams

“In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: forget about it. Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it. One day, you will glance up at your collection of Japanese literature, or trip over the solar oven you built, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself.” ~ Grace Llewellyn

“All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.”

~ Grace Llewellyn

“If our earth is to survive, we need to take responsibility for what we do. Taking control of our own education is the first step.”

~ Heidi Priesnitz

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

~ Henry Adams

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?”

~ Henry David Thoreau

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”  ~ H. L. Mencken

“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

“The child who attends public school typically spends approximately 1,100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these — 220 — are spent, as the educators say, ‘on task’. Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent, are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters.”

~ Homeschooling For Excellence

“The act of placing the power over learning and life into the individual’s hands is both empowering and motivating. The ‘motivation’ people see in unschoolers is really a joy in learning that is seen far less often among the masses in school.”

~ Idzie Desmarais

“Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.”

~ Ilya Ehrenburg

“School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.” ~ Ivan Illich

“Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.” ~ Ivan Illich

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”

~ Ivan Illich

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”

~ Isaac Asimov

“Children are not our own art products to be turned out well, but their own life work in continual process.”

~ Jan Fortune Wood

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society…But for me, education means making creators…You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.”

~ Jean Piaget

“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

~ John Updike

“The more I think about it the more I think high school is seriously warped.”

~ J.S. Feliciano

“Every day I went to school was a constant attack on my self-worth. I learned not to believe in myself. It was a bombardment from all directions; the teachers were saying how bad I was doing in their classes, my family was ashamed of my grades, and the students were attacking me about everything under the sun! I was like a plant trying to grow in darkness–it doesn’t. It all left me afraid to dream my dreams-afraid to be my true self! Who wants to show their true self if they’re just going to get a rock hurled at it?! The real question is: how do we undo the damage done? We have to take time to dream again, not other peoples’, but our own precious dreams that mean everything to us. Our dreams are our life maps.”

~ Jenny Smith – unschooler

“Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”

~ John Dewey

“Education now seems 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 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.” ~ John Holt

The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.” ~ John Holt

“A person’s freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take from someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.” ~ John Holt

Teaching does not make learning…organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to 100% false. Learners make learning.” ~ John Holt

“There is no difference between living and learning… it is impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as being separate.” ~ John Holt

“Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process, the independent scientist in the child disappears.” ~ John Holt

“All I am saying … can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” ~ John Holt

“Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.” -John Holt

“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.” ~ 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.” ~ John Holt

“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

“Ask questions to find out something about the world itself, not to find out whether or not someone knows it.”

~ John Holt

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges. It should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“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

“One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can’t be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.” -John Taylor Gatto

“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.”

~ John Taylor Gatto

“The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”

-John Updike

“The parent knows that the child cannot be artificially motivated to learn; they know that he is already motivated by the strongest driving force on earth: his inner intent.”

~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

“Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see from families who have homeschooled their kids from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life.”

~ Judy Garvey in GWS

“Like jilted and disappointed lovers, some of my students just want to be left alone.”

~ Kirsten Olson

“The idea that people should study for about 12 years and then start living is more deeply seated in our culture than many people realize.”

~ Larry and Susan Kaseman

“Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created ‘dangerous,’ free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.”

~ Laurie A. Couture

“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.”

~ Leonardo da Vinci

“Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.”

~ Lillian Smith

“Artificial learning takes what is simple and natural and turns it into a complex array of objectives, goals, measurements, administrators, supervisors, counselors, and transportation experts. Natural education requires only a guide providing direction, and a learner ready to discover and create goals and values that are personally meaningful.”

~ Linda Dobson

“I recognize June by the flowers, now. I used to know it by review tests, and restlessness.”

~ Lisa Asher, unschooled teen

“If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.”

~ Linda Darling-Hammond

“Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.”

-Madeleine L’Engle

“My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.”

~ Margaret Mead

“The most potent force for change… is the growing recognition of millions of adults that their own impoverished expectations and frustrations came, in large measure, from their schooling.”

~ Marilyn Ferguson

“Whenever I had second thoughts about the socialization my children may have been missing by homeschooling, I’d take them to a G-rated matinee movie. One look around the theater at the running, screaming, popcorn-throwing little socialites was enough to overcome my doubts.”

~ Mario Pagnoni

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

~ Mark Twain

“I hate, loathe and despise schools….School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.”

-Maurice Sendak

Everywhere I go I encounter older people who seem to be technologically challenged… and I am talking about smart people . It could only be schooling that has capped their ability to learn on their own. ~ Miscellaneous Quotes

“Love goes towards love as schoolboys from their books; Love from love, toward school with heavy looks.” ~ Miscellaneous Quotes

“A blunt ax and programmed education are like fording a river instead of crossing the bridge. The things you planned to do today didn’t get done. ~ Miscellaneous Quotes

“The teacher who is attempting to teach a pupil with no desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.” ~ Miscellaneous Quotes

“It really is astonishing to think that no one gets proper training on how to create, build and grow a business that they truly love, even though it is one of the most important components of our lives.”  ~ Miscellaneous Quotes

~ Miscellaneous Quotes

“The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live.

~ Mortimer Adler

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”

~ Noam Chomsky

“My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.”

~ Natalie Goldberg

“Most people, most of the time, learn most of what they know about science and technology outside of school.”

~ National Science Foundation

“I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.” ~ Pablo Picasso

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

~ Pablo Picasso

“Life is learning, learning is life. Unschoolers simply do not think there are times for learning and times for not learning. They don’t divide life into school time or lesson time versus play time or recreation time. There is no such thing as “extracurricular” to an unschooler – all of life, every minute of every day, counts as learning time, and there is no separate time set aside for “education.”

~ Pam Sorooshian

“When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”

~ Paul Simon

“We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing.”

~ Peggy Pirro

A prison,according to the common , general definition is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school , as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told to do than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age. ~Peter Gray

7 + 1 Sins of our System of Forced Education

Sin 1 – Denial of liberty without just cause and due process.

Sin 2 – Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.

Sin 3 – Undermining of intrinsic motivation to learn (turning learning into work)

Sin 4 – Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating.

Sin 5 – Interference with the development of cooperation and promotion of bullying.

Sin 6 – Inhibition of critical thinking.

Sin 7 – Reduction in diversity of skills and knowledge.

Plus One – Interference with family life.

~ Peter Gray

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

~ Peter Thiel

“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

-Plato

“I was fortunate enough to extricate myself before insensibility set in.”

~ Rabindranath Tagore, on quitting school at 13

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.”

~ Rachel Carson

“Skill to do comes of doing.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Children who live surrounded by rules, instead of learning about principles, end up becoming adept at getting around rules, finding the loopholes in rules, disguising non-compliance, or deflecting blame for non-compliance (i.e. lying about what they did). These are the skills that they then bring into adult life.”

~ Robyn Coburn

“The best function of the school in my head, as it turns out, is to remind me where not to dwell. I did my time in and around school, and learned things painstakingly and grudgingly that my children later learned while laughing and playing and singing.”

~ Sandra Dodd

“Growing up, I couldn’t understand the confusion. Wasn’t it obvious that I could learn math and physics if I wanted to? Couldn’t my uncle see that I had no use for chemistry but that if I did, I’d learn it? Why did anyone care, anyway? And why did people ask me if I knew math and English but they didn’t ask whether I knew about good nutrition or how to shingle a roof?”

~ Sarabeth Matilsky

“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

“Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization… I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.”

~ Seymour Papert

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.”

~Simone Weil

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”

~ Stanley Kubrik

“Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?”

~ T. S. Eliot

“Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.”

~ Tom Hodgkinson

“The only thing I didn’t do in school was learn.”

-unschooler Jason Lescalleet

“People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.”

~ Warren Buffett

“If we truly are living as if school doesn’t exist, we can stop describing ourselves in school terms. We can de-couple learning – and the life we’re living with our families – from the institution of school. When we use words like ‘unschooling,’ we are reacting to school, rather than leaving it behind as the short-term social experiment it was.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

(This quote makes me happy that I was not able to find a good domain with the term “unschooling” in it!)

“We need to separate our identities as people from our university degree.  That of course, ultimately means letting our names appear naked on our business cards.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“The mere fact that most school attendance is compulsory reflects an attitude of mistrust of children and their desire to make sense of the world. In fact, if governments were really serious about their professed goal of developing, nurturing, and enhancing the intellectual and moral autonomy of the young, would they not have to abolish compulsory, externally imposed education?” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“We must demolish the institution of schooling because it impedes learning and enslaves children. Then we need to put both money and creativity into creating opportunities and infrastructures that respect children and help them learn.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Our rapidly moving, information-based society badly needs people who know how to find facts rather than memorize them, and who know how to cope with change in creative ways. You don’t learn those things in school.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“I wonder why so many parents still want to keep their children hidden away in schools, when they could be learning in the wonderful, bright, ever-changing, always-stimulating real world.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“The force-feeding process of schooling is so relentless that many students gag on it. They tune out or leave school, and in some cases, become permanently soured on learning.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Children don’t need to be taught how to learn; they are born learners. They come out of the womb interacting with and exploring their surroundings. Babies are active learners, their burning curiosity motivating them to learn how the world works. And if they are given a safe, supportive environment, they will continue to learn hungrily and naturally – in the manner and at the speed that suits them best.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Our schooling has led us to misunderstand the difference between the power to do something and the force that makes us do something. We were told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, to put up our hands when we had to go to the bathroom, and to buy what we were offered.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Because schools suffocate children’s hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now call ‘learned incompetency’ and a fear of not being able to do things ‘right’ the first time.”

~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

~ William Butler Yeats

“There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.”

~ William Glasser

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to  master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.  

~ William Torrey Harris

“I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.” ~Winston Churchill

“How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude.” -Winston Churchill

“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education…they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” ~ Winston Churchill

“I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.”

~ Winston Churchill

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

~ Woodrow Wilson – President