Quotes & Sayings About Homeschooling

Knowledge is recognizing what you know and what you don't. — Confucius

This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. But I do, and I'll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you're learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you've been leaning on and says, "Now, go it alone! — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism. — William R. Bowen

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

This book is not about "homeschooling" at all. School is an artificial institution contrived by man. This book is about educating a child in the heart of the family given to that child by his Creator. — Elizabeth Foss

All governments are ordained by God, but none compare to government by God, theocracy. — William R. Bowen

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

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

Successful teaching is not head-to-head; it is heart-to-heart. — Tamara L. Chilver

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. — John Holt

Homeschooling is more than Latin and Logic. It is a way of life. And that way of life includes having disciplined children, and encouraging loving relationships within the family. We want peace in our homes. — Laurie Bluedorn

And the truth is that by homeschooling, you're doing something that a large part of society isn't doing. Being different is a ministry. — Jamerrill Stewart

I was shocked, however, to discover that homeschooling is not allowed in the Netherlands. I could only imagine that after legalizing pot, prostitution and gambling, they had to outlaw something. — Quinn Cummings

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

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

As a homeschooling parent, I have often wondered who learns more in our family, the parent or the child. The topic I seem to be learning the most about is the nature of learning itself. — Jan Hunt

My mother, who taught me how to read and write and home-schooled me for the first 12 years of my life, whose presence shaped me as much as her absence did, who imbibed in me the values of empathy and fearlessness and hard work, looks down on me today with great pride. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

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

Homeschooling is not head-to-head, it's heart-to-heart. — Tamara L. Chilver

In the average home there is much work to be done, and God does not approve of laziness. But beware thinking that your schedule (whether it is a homeschooling schedule or feeding-the-baby schedule) is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Life in our homes should be characterized by joy and thanksgiving so that children are taught and nourished in a way that takes their souls into account. — Nancy Wilson

The enemy will do anything to rob my joy of homeschooling and parenting. He wanted me to live in bondage and feel guilty and like I was never doing enough to have me miss the real joy of just being home with my children. — Tamara L. Chilver

Had I ever spent the day in our neighborhood public high school as an invisible woman while my children were still enrolled there, I no doubt would have insisted on home schooling. — Jeanne Ray

Without knowing it, I had stumbled upon one of the basic postulates of homeschooling: Anything you do with a home-schooled child outside the home can be described as a "field trip", thus rendering whatever activity you pursue a legitimate educational experience. — Quinn Cummings

Homeschooling allows you the freedom to step off the highway of learning and take a more scenic route along a dirt road. — Tamara L. Chilver

What's the matter?" asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered fact.

"Why - why," said Elizabeth Ann, "I don't know what I am at all. If I'm second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?"

The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. "you aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in! And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table? — Dorothy Canfield

Each of us is born with a crazy passion to learn. Each of us craves knowledge of our world and our place within it. We learn because we want to learn, because it's important to us, because it's natural, and because it's impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing. — Ps Pirro

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. — William Howard Taft

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. — John Maynard Keynes

Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best — A.S. Neill

Education is a system of imposed ignorance. — Noam Chomsky

If I had to sum up homeschooling in one word, it would be freedom. — Tamara L. Chilver

Cultivating strong family bonds is a natural side effect of homeschooling as we pursue our interests, share chores and simply enjoy one another's company. — Laura Grace Weldon

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

I want home educators to look beyond the lesson plans, curriculum, and grades to see the abundant blessings. My desire is for parents to enjoy the journey rather than focus on the destination.
When you begin to embrace the journey- TRULY embrace the journey- the joy of homeschooling will be absolutely A.MA.ZING. You will begin to see the much larger picture and God's work in your homeschool day more than you ever have before. — Tamara L. Chilver

We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans. — Voddie T. Baucham Jr.

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

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

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. — John Ruskin

The secret to successful homeschooling is faithfulness - consistency if you rather. — Pam Barnhill

There is no other complex field in our society in which do-it-yourself beats out factory production or market production. Nobody makes his or her own car. But it is still the case that parents can perform the job of educating their children [homeschooling], in many cases better than our present education system. — Milton Friedman

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

I was anticipating that some readers might misread [ the book]ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling. — Emma Donoghue

When I look at a child, I see a living, breathing person, made in God's image, for whom God has a plan. As parent educators, we need to embrace a new notion of learning ... we need to engage the hearten order to effectively educate the child. Our vision of a well-educated child is a child who has a heart for learning, a child who has the tools he needs to continue to learn for a lifetime and a child who has the love to want to do it. — Elizabeth Foss

Homeschooling? What was she thinking? All I could envision were those religious families, the ones with the little girls wearing Amish dresses and the boys with their slicked-back hair and matching polo shirts. I'd seen groups of them at the mall, following their mother single file, pretending it was a field trip. — Karen McQuestion

Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies. — Alfie Kohn

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly. — G.K. Chesterton

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

I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me. — Saint Augustine

I do a kind of homeschooling where some of it's on the computer and some of it's classes around the city. So sometimes I'll have a class in the morning or do school at home. — Lilla Crawford

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

I've been homeschooling for eight years and have always received the best advice and encouragement from other homeschoolers, rather than a book or lecture. — Lisa Whelchel

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

Proverbs 16:3 'Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and He will establish your plans.' A great reminder when planning out the school year. — Tamara L. Chilver

Daniel Dennett, philosopher Unsupervised homeschooling. When we come to recognize that willfully misinforming a child - or keeping a child illiterate, innumerate, and uninformed - is as evil as sexual abuse, we will forbid parents to treat their children as possessions whom they may indoctrinate as they please. They may teach their children any religious creed they like, but only if they also teach the uncontroversial facts about the world's religions so their children can make an informed choice when they grow up. — Anonymous

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

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

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

Notice the difference: A child's disability is the focus in traditional classroom settings, but his abilities are the focus in the homeschool environment. — Sandra K. Cook

I started homeschooling when I was 13. I wasn't really doing the social media thing yet; I didn't have any fans, but I knew that public school wasn't the place for me. It was draining my creativity, and so both my parents supported me in being homeschooled, and they really gave me a chance to focus on getting good at guitar. — Jacob Whitesides

I've met seven homeschooling families through many, many extracurricular activities such as fencing. I don't have a point of view of homeschooling. For some families, homeschooling works. — Rebecca Stead

George dutifully dusted the marks from the expensive rug and retired to the kitchen to await a grave and disapproving Collins, wishing with all of his boyish heart that he had applied for the stables. Cleaning stalls had to be beneficial exercise, and surely one must become accustomed to the smells...eventually. — Sarah Brazytis

All the homeschooling parents I know meet on a regular basis with other families. They organize field trips, cooking classes, reading clubs and Scout troops. Their children tend to be happy, confident and socially engaged. — Quinn Cummings

A 'school-at-home' approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors. — Joseph Chilton Pearce

Regarding school vs. homeschool
If it works, send them there!
If it doesn't, don't import it. — Joyce Herzog

From my great-grandfather: not to have attended schools for the public; to have had good teachers at home, and to realize that this is the sort of thing on which one should spend lavishly. — Marcus Aurelius

Paul's story is good news for those of us who are tempted to put our trust in ourselves, in our own ability to work hard enough to merit God's favor. Grace is so surprising! It's surprising because while it may seem likely that a prostitute would recognize her need for rescue, the homeschooling, bread-baking, devotion-reading mom who attends her local church faithfully (while trusting in her own goodness) will choke on the humiliating message of gospel rescue. Rescue? Why would she need rescuing? — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words. — Jane Austen

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

Thank goodness my education was neglected. — Beatrix Potter

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

I'm not saying homeschooling will be easy. I am saying it will be worth it. — Tamara L. Chilver

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

The real legacy of Christian homeschooling is people who grow to adulthood and influence a new generation of children. And the greatest tribute possible to the homeschooling parent is to see that work carry forward. — Alexandra Swann

I LOVE homeschooling and want others who have been led to do it to love it, too. — Tamara L. Chilver

Labels are OK for marketing something, but does the Unschooling philosophy of life need any marketing? No. In so many ways, Unschooling stands for a refusal of marketing and a rejection of any consumerist approach to learning.
Your learning IS your life, not something you purchase subject by subject in the big education supermarket to hang on the wall like a diploma or certificate. Unschooling by its nature does not need to set up an 'Institute of Unschooling' or an 'Unschooling Foundation': that would be the purest contradiction-in-terms, to institutionalize the very practice that most undermines institutionalization! — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

The primary focus of homeschooling should be on cultivating hearts for the Lord. — Tamara L. Chilver

Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. They were not sent away from home each day to a place just for children but lived, learned, worked, and played in the real world, alongside adults and other children of all ages. — Rachel Gathercole

When we talk about homeschooling today, we're amazed at how many people agree that they didn't learn much in school, that school teaches kids to pass the test and move on rather than explore and investigate and inquire... — Linda Dobson

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

Homeschooling is not a race ... You will not get behind nor do you have to live with guilt that you feel the need to catch up. — Tamara L. Chilver

Homeschooling has given us some wonderful flexibility and some great life experiences, especially with our son. — Jodi Benson

You must pray ... without prayer, all the schooling in the world will not produce the effect God wants homeschooling to give. — John Hardon

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

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

Learning and education are a normal part of everyday life and do not need a vast expensive bureaucracy to force them to happen. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

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

More important...you've assembled a curriculum that works for him. It's his education. I suspect he's more likely to have a real education, an education that sticks, if he's part of shaping it. — Quinn Cummings

[Homeschooling] ... recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons. — Raymond S. Moore

I'm pretty much using media all day because my school is online. It's sort of like homeschooling but also like going to real school - you log in and do all your work and email it to the teacher, and we have a teacher who oversees us on set. — Nolan Gould

My aim in homeschooling is to give my children the ability to be an adult learner, a skill set that will last the rest of their lives. — Nancy Pearcey

The key is to understand that our children don't belong to us - they belong to God. Our goal as parents must not be limited by our own vision. I am a finite, sinful, selfish man. Why would I want to plan out my children's future when I can entrust them to the infinite, omnipotent, immutable, sovereign Lord of the universe? I don't want to tell God what to do with my children - I want Him to tell me! — Voddie T. Baucham Jr.

When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable. — Elizabeth Foss

One of the beauties of homeschooling is that it allows us to recognize and nurture each one of our very special individual children. — Anonymous

Everyone thinks it goes smoothly in everyone else's house, and theirs is the only place that has problems. I'll let you in on a secret about teaching: there is no place in the world where it rolls along smoothly without problems. Only in articles and books can that happen. — Ruth Beechick

On a certain level, homeschooling is all about socialization. Whatever the teaching methods used in school or homeschool, it is ultimately the social environment itself that distinguishes homeschooling from conventional school. This social environment includes the nature and quantity of peer interaction; parental proximity; solitude; relationships with adults, siblings, older children, younger children, and the larger community; the ways in which the children are disciplined and by whom; and even the student-teacher ratio and the overall environment where the children spend their time. — Rachel Gathercole

It is also important to remember that no state in the United States requires a homeschooling parent to have a public school teaching certificate, just as many private schools do not require one (though some, such as Montessori and Waldorf, require teacher training in their unique programs). The — Patrick Farenga

Children are not only extremely good at learning; they are much better at it than we are. — John Holt

Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school. — John Holt

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is. — Ivan Illich