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Quips, Quotes, Adages, and Aphorisms on Homeschool, Public School, Life, and Learning

WE LEARN NOT FOR SCHOOL,
BUT FOR LIFE.

These life-learning, life-affirming quotations will help you find the right words to explain your homeschool lifestyle to skeptics ... or help you take the homeschooling plunge ... or maybe help you remember why you decided to homeschool in the first place!

Some are serious and some are just plain silly, so enjoy them for what they are!

for any information mail
mail us :infinityknowledgecity@gmail.com

ON INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOLING 

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

Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
~ Wendy Priesnitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ON INSTITUTIONAL SCHOOLING 

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto

"A work of breathtaking scholarship and encyclopedic scope." -Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review, author of What Smart Students Should Know

"Gatto's voice is strong and unique. I loved this book!" -Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

"Gatto is a singular antidote to stale convention." -David Guterson, Snow Falling On Cedars

"I give this book a standing ovation!" -Christiane Northrup, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom

"Brilliant work!" -Laissez Faire Books

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling

by: John Taylor Gatto, John Taylor Gatto

Amazon Price: $30.83 (as of 10/02/2010)

"School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course."

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."

"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory."

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

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ON PUBLIC SCHOOL'S HIDDEN CURRICULUM 

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto, a former public school teacher who was named official New York Teacher of the Year, updates his theories on how the U.S. educational system cranks out students the way Detroit cranks out Buicks. He contends that students are more programmed to conform to economic and social norms rather than really taught to think.

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

by: John Taylor Gatto

Amazon Price: $9.20 (as of 10/02/2010)

This radical treatise on public education has been a New Society Publishers' bestseller for 10 years! Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City's public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory governmental schooling does little but teach young people to follow orders as cogs in the industrial machine.

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

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
~ H. L. Mencken

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

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HOMESCHOOL FAQ 

Questions about homeschooling or unschooling? Ask them here!

If you have questions about homeschooling, don't miss this amazingly helpful resource page! All your questions answered, plus lots more answers to questions you haven't even thought of yet!

Homeschool FAQ

Do you have questions about whether you should homeschool, or how you can? You've come to the right place. Here is an extensive list of questions and answers, with links to some of the best resources on the web.

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

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

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

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

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ON SOCIAL BENEFITS OF HOMESCHOOLING 

The Well-Adjusted Child, by Rachel Gathercole

The dreaded "S" question: but what about socialization? Answer it with actual facts rather than debating opinions, what-ifs, and maybes! The research is in, and homeschooled children have nothing to worry about in the socialization department!

The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling

by: Rachel Gathercole

Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 10/02/2010)

Drawing on her own experiences as a homeschooler, Gathercole details the networks of other homeschoolers who provide opportunities for their children - and themselves - to socialize. Gathercole also points to research showing that homeschooled children have stronger self-concepts than children attending conventional schools. Great encouragement for parents who are homeschooling and those who are considering it.

ON BOREDOM & AMUSEMENT 

Homeschooling quotations

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

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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

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent.
~ Plato

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

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. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry.
~ Albert Einstein

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

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ON LEARNING ALL THE TIME 

Learning All The Time: How Children Begin to Read, Write, Count, and Investigate the World Without Being Taught, by John Holt

This highly opinionated former teacher and original thinker spent the last half of his life challenging widely accepted classroom practices. Holt is widely considered the father of the modern-day homeschooling movement because he grew to believe that schools stifle the learning process. In this, his final book - compiled by colleagues from drafts, letters, and magazine essays written by Holt before he died in 1985 - he strings together his own observations and philosophies to show how young children can be encouraged to learn everything from reading and math to music and science.

Learning All The Time

by: John Holt

Amazon Price: $12.82 (as of 10/02/2010)

Holt's call for context amid learning is delivered in a sensible, delightful writing style. He even includes several graphics and number games that can easily be used at home. Anyone who comes in contact with a small child would benefit from--and enjoy--reading these last words from a man who clearly adored and remained mesmerized by children and their inquisitive minds.

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

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

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

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

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

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ON BECOMING MORE CREATIVE 

A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative, by Roger von Oech

Roger von Oech is the president of Creative Think, a California-based consulting firm that has conducted creativity seminars with such companies as American Express, Apple Computer, AT&T, CBS, IBM, NBC, and NASA. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in a self-conceived program in the history of ideas.

A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative

by: Roger von Oech

Amazon Price: $11.55 (as of 10/02/2010)

For 25 years, this creativity classic has been stimulating creativity in millions of readers, translated into 11 languages, and used in seminars around the world. Now Roger von Oech's fully illustrated and updated volume is filled with even more provocative puzzles, anecdotes, exercises, metaphors, cartoons, questions, quotations, stories, and tips designed to systematically break through your mental blocks and unlock your mind for creative thinking. This new edition will attract an entire new generation of readers with updated and mind-stretching material.

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

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ON READING NONSENSE 

The Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse, edited by Louise Guinness

This hilariously readable collection of classic nonsense poetry, delightfully illustrated throughout, is a showcase of comic talent and sheer silliness.

The Everyman Book of Nonsense Verse (Everyman's Library Children's Classics)

Amazon Price: $15.26 (as of 10/02/2010)

An eclectic spectrum of contributors ranging wildly from Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll to Hilaire Belloc, Ted Hughes, Ogden Nash, and Shakespeare, with illustrations by Mervyn Peake, Quentin Blake, Emma Chichester Clark, Spike Milligan, and the deliciously sinister Edward Gorey. Such old favorites as "The Owl and the Pussycat" are accompanied by "Macavity: The Mystery Cat" and "Jabberwocky," while Ted Hughes's "Wodwo" sits alone by the bank of a stream in a state of innocence and curiosity that mirrors a child's sense of wonder at the universe. Whether sweetly funny or deliciously naughty, these masterpieces of the art of the absurd will charm readers both young and old.

HOMESCHOOL T'S & GEAR 

T-shirts & totes, hats & hoodies, mugs & magnets, & lots more homeschool gear!

Advertise your allegiance with humor, bite, or a revolutionary flair! For homeschoolers and unschoolers everywhere.

'Homeschool the Revolution' T-shirts and Gifts

Should the state be in charge of the children and the shape of the future, or should we stand on principle and shape our children ourselves? The revolutionaries will be homeschooled! WARNING: Not for faint-of-heart homeschoolers! T-shirts and tote...

Homeschool T-shirts and Gear

Say it loud, say it proud: we homeschool and you should too! Here is where you'll find what you need to let the world know what you do and why. From lighthearted to revolutionary, you'll find a design to express your homeschool spirit. T-shirts and t...

Homeschooling and Socialization Go Together Like T-shirts and Torsos!

If you homeschool, you've heard the "S" question ... waaaaayyy too many times! "But what about socialization?" is what's on everyone's mind. You can circumvent the question if you wear the answer on your shirt! That way the few (the very few) people...

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

Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.
~ Charlotte Mason

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, 'What's your alma mater?' 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

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ON SELF-DIRECTED HIGHER EDUCATION 

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, by Anya Kamenetz

Back before the digital revolution, access to information was an issue. The size of the library mattered. One reason to go to college was to get access. Today, that access is worth a lot less.... The solutions are obvious - there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference. Start with this book. - Seth Godin

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

by: Anya Kamenetz

Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 10/02/2010)

The price of college tuition has increased more than any other major good or service for the last twenty years. Nine out of ten American high school seniors aspire to go to college, yet the United States has fallen from world leader to only the tenth most educated nation. Almost half of college students don't graduate; those who do have unprecedented levels of federal and private student loan debt, which constitutes a credit bubble similar to the mortgage crisis. The future lies in personal learning networks and paths, learning that blends experiential and digital approaches, and free and open-source educational models. Increasingly, you will decide what, when, where, and with whom you want to learn, and you will learn by doing.

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

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

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

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ON MOTIVATION 

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge,
not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
~ George Bernard Shaw


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

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

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

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
~ Abbé Dimnet

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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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

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.
~ James Beattie


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

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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.

Think Fun Railroad Rush Hour

Your locomotive is blocked in the freight yard and you'll have to move those freight cars and baggage platforms to free it. Fifty different challenges and twenty colorful game pieces add to the fun. Includes a travel bag. Ages 6 to adult.

Amazon Price: $18.41 (as of 10/02/2010)

SET Game

This award winning card game is for one or more players, age six and up. The object of the game is to identify "sets" of three cards. A "set" consists of three cards on which each feature is either the same on all of the cards, or different on all of the cards.

Amazon Price: $9.08 (as of 10/02/2010)

Think fun Visual Brainstorms

One hundred of the world's best brainteaser puzzle cards each guaranteed to challenge, entertain, captivate, amuse and enlighten you!

Amazon Price: $11.92 (as of 10/02/2010)

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
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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

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LITERATURE-BASED HOMESCHOOLING 

How to use literature in your homeschool curriculum!

'Five in a Row' Literature-Based Unit Studies: Easy, Inexpensive, Fun!

As an educator, mother, and homeschooler, I have a rave curriculum review for all you new (and seasoned) homeschoolers out there. Five in a Row is the best, easiest, most fun, and cheapest homeschool curriculum, guaranteed to prevent teacher/student...

Learn Shapes, Numbers, Colors, and More From Little Rabbit and Friends

Alan Baker's "Little Rabbit" series of books are some of my daughter's absolute favorites, and they are books I don't get tired of reading to her. The illustrations are beautiful and the simple, sweet stories are utterly charming. It's hard to find a...

How to Get Your Child to Love Reading: Exploring Everything in the World Through Books

The subtitle says it all! "For ravenous and reluctant readers alike: Activities, ideas, and inspiration for exploring everything in the world through books." With over 3,000 hand-picked titles and descriptions, as well as craft and storytime ideas an...

ON WISDOM 

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

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ON FINDING WISDOM 

The Quotable Spirit: Quotations of Wisdom and Grace

The Quotable Spirit: Quotations of Wisdom and Grace

Amazon Price: $11.01 (as of 10/02/2010)

With more than 1,000 quotations from over 500 spiritual masters, world leaders, writers, artists and poets from every time, place and faith, this vast compendium offers endless insight and inspiration. History's wisest men and women - from Aristotle and Confucius to Shakespeare and Desmond Tutu - offer memorable reflections on such topics as joy and despair, enlightenment, love and nature.

ON CHARACTER & ETHICS 

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

We can get too easily bogged down in the academic part of homeschooling, a relatively minor part of the whole, which is to raise competent, caring, literate, happy people.
~ Diane Flynn Keith

The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man which it forms. If it injures the intelligence, it is bad; if it injures the character, it is vicious; if it injures the conscience, it is criminal.
~ Amiel

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

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ON HOMESCHOOLING AS A FAMILY ENDEAVOUR 

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook, by Raymond and Dorothy Moore

Dr. Raymond Moore and his wife Dorothy are widely regarded as the grandparents of homeschooling.

The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook

by: Dorothy Moore, Raymond Moore

Amazon Price: $10.19 (as of 10/02/2010)

If you are thinking about homeschooling, or are struggling with a educational homeschooling curriculum that is difficult to use, let Dr. Ray and Dorothy Moore show you how to make homeschooling an easy-to-live-with family adventure in learning. This low-stress, low-cost program shows you how to build a curriculum around your child's needs and interests - and around a realistic family schedule. Instead of a cut-and-dried approach, you'll discover the freedom of a flexible program that encourages creativity and initiative.

ON THE HOME ENVIRONMENT 

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 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

There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.
~ Gandhi

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


To be Queen Elizabeth within a certain area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, books, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene.

I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it.

How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No: A woman's function is laborious because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
~ G. K. Chesterton

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

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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

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

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

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ON LIVING LIFE 

Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better, by John Holt

Be clear about this: Instead of Education, although less widely known than his more famous titles, is John Holt at the top of his game. If you are one of the millions of walking wounded still staggering from your own encounter with forced institutional schooling, and trying to spare your own kids from its damage, this book will be your guide and a good friend. - John Taylor Gatto, Former New York State Teacher of the Year

John Holt was a prophetic voice in the educational wilderness who vividly explained why our system of schooling often frustrates genuine learning. He made this quite clearly indeed in his groundbreaking work Instead of Education. It is as radically relevant to the educational challenges of our generation as it was to his. - Ron Miller, Ph.D. Author of Free Schools, Free People

Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better

by: John Holt

Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 10/02/2010)

In this breakthrough work, Holt lays out the foundation for unschooling as the vital path to self-directed learning and a creative life. Packed with examples of how to create learning opportunities outside the established educational structure, as well as fascinating stories of people who choose to self-educate, noncompulsory schools, learning centers, and informal learning arrangements in action, this is Holt's most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a dramatic appeal to parents to save their children from schools of all kinds.

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


Eagles
don't
flock.
.

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ON TEACHING YOUR OWN 

Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling

Teach Your Own is the very first homeschooling book I ever read. It is also the only one I have read more than two or three times - this is my "go-to" book, the one I make sure to reread every few years to make sure I'm still on the right homeschooling track. If you only read one homeschooling book, make sure it is Teach Your Own.

Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling

by: John Holt, Pat Farenga

Amazon Price: $16.20 (as of 10/02/2010)

The classic work on teaching children at home, updated for today's new laws, new lifestyles, and a new generation of homeschooling parents. Today more than one and a half million children are being taught at home by their own parents. In this expanded edition of the book that helped launch the whole movement, Pat Farenga has distilled John Holt's timeless understanding of the ways children come to understand the world and added up-to-the-moment practical advice. Rather than proposing that parents turn their homes into miniature schools, Holt and Farenga demonstrate how ordinary parents can help children grow as social, active learners. Chapters on living with children, "serious play," children and work, and learning difficulties will be of interest to all parents, whether homeschooling or not, as well as to teachers. This new edition is supplemented with legal advice as well as a guide to cooperating with schools and facing the common objections to homeschooling. Teach Your Own not only has all the vital information necessary to be the definitive reference for parents teaching their own children, it also conveys John Holt's wise and passionate belief in every child's ability to learn from the world that has made his wonderful books into enduring classics.

HOMESCHOOL FAQ 

Questions about homeschooling or unschooling? Ask them here!

If you have questions about homeschooling, don't miss this amazingly helpful resource page! All your questions answered, plus lots more answers to questions you haven't even thought of yet!

Homeschool FAQ

Do you have questions about whether you should homeschool, or how you can? You've come to the right place. Here is an extensive list of questions and answers, with links to some of the best resources on the web.

Are You a Homeschooler on Squidoo? 

Meet more homeschoolers on Squidoo!

Connect with other homeschoolers on Squidoo! Join The Homeschool Club and learn to make money writing about what you know best: homeschooling!

Homeschoolers on Squidoo

Wouldn't it be fun to know the lens you're looking at was made by a fellow homeschooler? Let's link up! Add your link here, and you'll be added as a featured lensmaster! If you know other homeschoolers on Squidoo, tell them to add their links, too!

The Homeschool Club on Squidoo

The Homeschool Club on Squidoo is a collaboration between Squidoo, the club founders (that's us: Evelyn and Carma), and homeschooling lensmasters (that's YOU!), to create the biggest and best compendium of homeschooling resources anywhere online! In...

How to Write About Homeschooling on Squidoo and Make Money!

Every homeschooling family could use a little boost in their budget, right? But we need to be able to make money from home, on a here-and-there sort of schedule, right? Wouldn't it be nice if we could make some extra money writing about homeschooling...

Writing About Homeschooling: Finding Topics for the Homeschool Club

Writing about homeschooling is a dream for many homeschoolers - something to do from home in your spare time to bring in a little bit to boost the homeschool budget. And while creating a blog is fairly easy these days, getting it found by readers oth...