A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D. or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B. - Fats Domino

A recent MORI poll, commissioned by the Campaign for Learning, found that 90% of adults were favourably inclined towards further learning for themselves.....The bad news is that 75% said they were unhappy and alienated in the school environment and that, therefore, they preferred to learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other than a school-type setting. - Meighan

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

A word to the wise, or even the unwise, is infuriating because it is insulting. When we teach without being asked, we are saying, in effect, 'You're not smart enough to know that you should know this, and not smart enough to learn it. - Holt

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

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 know and what you don't. - Anatole France

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. - Thomas Moore

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

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

By bells and many other similar techniques they (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

Childhood is not preparation for adulthood - it is a part of life. - A. Neill (principal - Summerhill Natural Learning Center)

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction. - Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller's teacher)

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more thanwe can ever learn from books. - John Lubbock

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

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices. - Laurence Peter

Education is an admirable thing, but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. - Oscar Wilde

Education is helping the child realise his potentialities. -Eric Fromm

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - William Butler Yeats

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know. - G k Chesterton

English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you 'take' and when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of Education?) - 'Independent' Editorial 7/1/00

For thousands of years, in thousands of places, families educated their own. This tradition changed not because a better method was found but because economic conditions required it. To work one had to leave one's children; one's children, furthermore, had to be trained for tasks no-one in their purview could be seen doing. For these reasons institutionalised schooling was invented and while it adequately addressed a set of economic problems it inspired a new set of human ones that are psychological, emotional, and even spiritual in nature. - David Guterson 'Family Matters - Why Homeschooling Makes Sense'

Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein

He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn't know. - George Simmel, German Philosopher

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice. - Albert Einstein

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

How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task. When we feel powerful and competent, we leap at difficult tasks. The difficulty does not discourage us; we think: Sooner or later, I'm going to get this. At other times we can only think: I'll never get this, it's too hard for me, I never was any good at this kind of thing, why do I have to do it, etc. Part of the art of teaching is being able to sense which of these moods learners are in. People can go from one mood to the other very quickly. - Holt

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 taught to think. - Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller's teacher)

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

I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but I would prefer that to their being educated by the state. - Max Victor Belz ( The Separation of School & State Alliance )

I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes. - Sigrid Undset, writer and Nobel Laureate (Literature)

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. - Mark Twain

I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster. - Edward de Bono

I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched. - Edward Grieg

I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me. - St. Augustine

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. - Albert Einstein

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

I say above all else don't let your home become [a] miniture copy of the school. no lesson plans, no quizzes, no tests, no report cards! even leaving your child alone would be better; at least they would figure out some things on their own. Live together as well as you can; enjoy life together as much as you can. - Holt

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. - 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

I think children can be very cruel especially in adolescence and if you are slow, and I was (I was in a school which was quite competitive) you do get a lot of slamming about from the other kids. I don't know about girls, but I know that boys are very cruel and very tough. It built up a tremendous resentment in me because I was also bad at sport and athletics and all I could do was play the piano. So I always got the sense in my adolescent years that 'Oh, Hopkins, you know he's, well he's not worth much, or he's a failure. - Anthony Hopkins

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. - Thoreau

If the schooling system does not rapidly close the gap between what it does, and what it should do in response to the demands of the 21st century, it will simply become irrelevant. - David Hood (Our Secondary Schools Don't Work Anymore - 1998)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world - Albert Einstein

In general the best teacher cannot match a parent of even ordinary education and experience. - Dr Raymond Moore, Home Grown Kids (1981)

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again. - Alvin Toffler

Instruction, and advice, and commands will profit little, unless they are backed up by the pattern of your own life. Your children will never believe you are in earnest, and really wish them to obey you, so long as your actions contradict your counsel... Think not your children will practise what they do not see you do. You are their model picture, and they will copy what you are... will seldom learn habits which they see you despise, or walk in paths in which you do not walk yourself. - J.C. Ryle, The Upper Room (1888)

It appears, therefore, that some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one's own inner world are all facilitated by solitude. - Anthony Storr

It could be argued that teachers are the best people to teach our children as they have been specially trained for this. But just as equipment is only of value if the child learns through its use - it has no worth otherwise - the qualifications of the teachers are of little value unless the child is actually learning. - Jean Bendell 'School's Out'

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

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. - Holt

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated. - Alec Bourne

It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society's goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don't get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn. - Charles Handy

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

It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. I realise increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior. I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher. - Carl Rogers

Keep children as much as possible by themselves ... keep them from company, good or bad. ... It will be generally found that the most virtuous and the most intellectual, are those who have been brought up with few companions. ... in fact his mental resources may be considered entirely unknown and unexplored, who cannot spend his best and happiest hours alone. - Jacob Abbott (1850)

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child. - Plato

Learning theory tells us to teach children as individuals who learn in their own unique manner. The finest possible curriculum is precisely the one that starts with each child's singular means of learning. Instruction and guidance are best provided by those with an intimate understanding of the individual child and a deep commitment to the child's education. - David Guterson 'Family Matters - Why Homeschooling Makes Sense'

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. - Bertrand Russell

Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children. - Holt

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. - Robert Maynard Hutchins

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. -Emma Goldman

Often it was not in school, but outside of it - in extracurricular activities or during time spent altogether away from school - that calling appeared. It is as if the image in the heart in so many cases is hampered by the program of tuition and its time bound regularity. - James Hillman 'The Soul's Code - In Search of Character & Calling'

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year. - Albert Einstein

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Parents and families are the first and most important teachers. If families teach a love of learning, it can make all the difference in the world to our children. - Richard W. Riley, U.S. Secretary of Education

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

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

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding. - Ezra Loomis Pound

Research ... reveals a significant advantage in social development for home schooled children. they are socially adept, possess a positive self-image, and are active in areas that devlop leadership skills. Thomas Smedley, in a 1992 controlled study, concluded: `... the home educated children in this sample were significantly better socialised and more mature than those in public school.' - Dr Brian Ray, HSLDA (Marching to the beat of their own drum! A profile of home education research)

Research clearly verifies that the more people there are around your children, the less opportunity they have for the meaningful social contact ... Psychologists have found, as many parents know instinctively, that peaceful solitude is necessary for mental health and that the less cluttered your childrens routine, the more secure they will be. - Dr Raymond Moore, Home Style Teaching (1984)

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency. - H. L. Mencken

School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school....my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in. - Rabindranath Tagore

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. - Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society1970

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. - E.M.Forster

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had loneliness and they knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in the would work. - Carl Sandburg

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. - E. M. Forster

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor. - Kierkegaard

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 Taylor Gatto

The Government's favourite formula for raising educational standards has the merit of simplicity. We are now top of the European league table in at least one respect: our children are subjected to more national school exams than those in any other country......Parents may comfort themselves with the thought that, however badly educated their children may be when they leave school, they will at least be able to do exams. - Thomas Armstrong

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Karl Feyerabend

The consequence is that the 'social' skills acquired are those which may be essential for survival in school but have little applicability in the outside world. There is virtually no opportunity to relate socially to adults in school in order to learn wider social skills. Ironically, such skills can only be learned outside school hours. Teachers do, of course, set up social scenarios and discuss with children how to behave in given social circumstances. But these are no substitute for learning through real-life, dynamic social contact - Rabindranath Tagore

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 ( 'Connect' New York October 98 )

The home is the first and most effective place to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self control, the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home. - David O. McKay, President of LDS Homeschooling in California

The idea is to educate, not follow anyone's schedule about when something should be studied. - Ray Drouillard

The immediate case against compulsory school for adolescents is quite simply their barbarity: it is a triangle of hatred, humiliation and contempt. - Frank Musgrove

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. - Robert Maynard Hutchins

The opportunity to develop and practise social skills in school is quite limited. Children spend nearly all their time in school with other children born during the same academic year as themselves, and a great deal of time outside school as well. In school, there is little social contact with younger or older children and even less with adults. It is easy to see how peer mores, values and codes of behaviour become entrenched, resulting in considerable pressure to conform and the threat of ostracism or exclusion from the group for those who do not. Moreover, up to one and a half hours a day in school is specifically set aside for social recreation in the playground, where children are thrown together with nothing much to do. It is not surprising that playground hierarchies emerge and bullying is rife. - Alan Thomas 'Educating Children at Home'

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

The problem with many materials for children is that they 'talk down' to the kids. Like many other home school parents, Michael and I have found that you do not need to talk down to your children in order to effectively teach them. In fact, they seem to respond better when they are given a bit of a challenge. Nor does artwork need to betray good taste in order to be captivating. As parents, we should strive to provide a nurturing environment that will help our children develop both a critical mind for detecting truth and a critical eye for appreciating beauty... - Susan and Michael Card The Homeschool Journey, Windows into the Heart of a Learning Family

The secret of education is respecting the pupil. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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'

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,For the Children's Sake (1984)

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings. - Lou Ann Walker

There are times when even the most skilful learner must admit to himself that for the time being he is trying to butt his head through a stone wall, and that there is no sense in it. At such times teachers are inclined to use students as a kind of human battering ram. I've done it too often myself. It doesn't work. - Holt

There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents. - G k Chesterton

To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. - Wendy Priesnitz

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. - Roger Lewin

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

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

We live in a hierarchical world in which we defend ourselves ....from our eternal infancy and childhood by insisting on a graded, necessary elevation through learning and technological sophistication out of the child into the adult. This is not a true initiation that values both the previous form of existence and the newly attained one; it is a defence against the humiliating reality of the child. - Thomas Moore

We prefer that they [the children] should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. 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

We should use kids' positive states to draw them into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies....You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure from being engaged in. - Howard Gardner 'Multiple Intelligences'

We're not trying to do School at Home. We're trying to do homeschool. These are two entirely different propositions. We're not trying to replicate the time, style or content of the classroom. Rather we're trying to cultivate a lifestyle of learning in which learning takes place from morning until bedtime 7 days each week. The formalportion of each teaching day is just the tip of the iceburg. - Steve and Jane Lambert ( Five In A Row )

What is essential is to realise that children learn independently, not in bunches; that they learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please or appease the adults in power; and that they ought to be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. - Holt

What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all. - John Holt

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.  What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child. - George Bernard Shaw

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

When I trained as a teacher I was introduced to two basic roles. One was that of a crowd control steward... The other basic role was that of crowd-instructor - Meighan

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 (American Economist)

When they learn in their own way and for their own reasons, children learn so much more rapidly and effectively than we could possibly teach them, that we can afford to throw away our curricula and our timetables, and set them free, at least most of the time, to learn on their own. - Holt

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, Home Grown Kids (1981)

When you make the finding yourself - even if you are the last person on Earth to see the light - you will never forget it. - Carl Sagan

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

Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety? - Daniel Goleman 'Emotional Intelligence'

We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world. - Joseph Chilton Pearce

Learning to love and accept ourselves is basic to human education. So is learning to language emotion in a positive way. Ultimately when we learn to truly love and accept ourselves, we'll be able to live well and love each other and every thing we encounter. - Barbara Hoberman Levine, Your Body Believes Every Word You Say

If you study to remember, you will forget, but, If you study to understand, you will remember. Unknown

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet. - Lord Chesterfield

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about. - Angela Schwindt

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself. - Galileo