33 Quotes About Unschooling

These unschooling quotes are here to inspire you to make wise choices. “Responsibility is a fact of life, and it comes from the moment we choose to take ownership for our life.” – J. Krishnamurti

If the emotions are free the intellect will look after...
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If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself A.S. Neill
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement,...
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Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. William Blake
There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic...
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There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge. Christopher Langan
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Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders. John Holt
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This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements, " usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything." It is the creed of a slave. John Holt
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To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Jiddu Krishnamurti
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For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it! " What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them. What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner. John Holt
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I no longer believe that the current education system is able to equip our children for a fast-moving future. Technology has evolved so rap-idly in the last five years that to put a child in an education system that was designed for a future that will most likely no longer exist for the majority, seems almost absurd. Lehla Eldridge
An uncorked kid to me is an expression as to...
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An uncorked kid to me is an expression as to who they truly are and isn't it that that as adults we strive to achieve throughout our whole lives? Lehla Eldridge
The belief that young people are incapable of making reasonable...
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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
For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school...
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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
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The most important question I ask myself as a parent is this. How can I best help my children be fully themselves and happy with who they are in the world, however they show up. Lehla Eldridge
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Schooling that children are forced to endure–in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests–turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels. Peter Gray
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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
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Education is a system. Learning is an ongoing every day process. Mommy Moo Moo
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Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this. Kytka HilmarJezek
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My goal has always been to inspire in them an ongoing love of learning. To awaken a feeling where their work is their passion, so that they never feel burdened or trapped by meeting their material needs, but instead thrive and experience wealth doing what they love while making a positive contribution to the world. To me that is the truest definition of success. Kytka HilmarJezek
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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 HilmarJezek
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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 HilmarJezek
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I simply stepped out of the way and maintained my courage and my position in the face of constant disagreement, voiced opinion and attack. I held true and I stood my ground. I maintained my convictions and my commitment to allowing them to live in the kingdom of childhood. I protected them from outside influence and allowed their imaginations to soar. I instilled a lifelong love of learning in them and I shared my passion for reading. I allowed them to choose what they wanted to study and I provided the resources for them to delve in, unguided and undisturbed for however long they needed to gather what they believed to be enough understanding to satisfy their own personal drive. Kytka HilmarJezek
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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
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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
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Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things. It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work. . Lori McWilliam Pickert
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Allowing children to learn about what interests them is good, but helping them do it in a meaningful, rigorous way is better. Freedom and choice are good, but a life steeped in thinking, learning, and doing is better. It’s not enough to say, “Go, do whatever you like.” To help children become skilled thinkers and learners, to help them become people who make and do, we need a life centered around those experiences. We need to show them how to accomplish the things they want to do. We need to prepare them to make the life they want. Lori McWilliam Pickert
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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
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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
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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
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Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It's not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. 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 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
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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
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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 HilmarJezek
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Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. John Holt
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The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher. . John Holt