Quotes & Sayings About Unschooling

The belief that young people are incapable of making reasonable decisions is a cornerstone of our system of compulsory, closely monitored education. — Peter O. Gray

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

If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself — A.S. Neill

For those orderly folks who have life all neatly arranged in their heads, who do more accepting than questioning, unschooling is a disturbing thing. — Sandra Dodd

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

Cause and effect is the basis of my education, leading me to an essence far more profound than any rule of societal conditioning. — Ka Chinery

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

Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It's not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age. — Peter Gray

Rock-a-bye Baby
In the tree top
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
And Mama will catch you
Cradle and all! — Kristen McKee

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

Unschooling is creating an environment in which children can learn easily and naturally all the time. — Sandra Dodd

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

The primary difference I see is that unschooling is an invitation to awaken and ennoble capabilities that exist within the child. Where traditional schooling is to fill the child with facts that we, as a collective have decided upon. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

My success or failure in school was dependent on my ability to follow a curriculum that felt as if it had very little to do with me as a human being. — Ben Hewitt

Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship. — John Ralston Saul

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. — William Blake

There are as many approaches to unschooling as there are people, by design. A child is supported to read when ready and interested, not on another's timetable, for example. He can and will be encouraged to pursue a wide range of interests, based on his interests, such as free play, inventing, experimenting scientifically, video gaming, role modeling through friendship, spiritual development through inquiry of self and others, athletics, learning to trust himself and others. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

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

However, unschooling doesn't imply that a child doesn't take classes or participate in structured learning activities. It means that we, the parents, don't attempt to make our children learn by giving assignments or otherwise manipulating or threatening them into learning and doing things. — Sara McGrath

Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They're individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.
It's up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work. — Lori McWilliam Pickert

For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them. — Anthony M. Esolen

Of all the things I want for them, connection to this place and a sense of knowing how they fit into this world usurps all others. I want this for them more than happiness, because I think mere happiness is a shallow elucidation of the human experience, and by itself is not a particularly sturdy emotional foundation upon which to build a fulfilling life. I want this for them more than success, at least insofar as our culture has come to define success as being a product of money and power and recognition. I want this for them more than physical vitality, because I believe that good health--and not just health of body, but also of emotion and spirit--is only possibly when one feels connected to and secure in their place. — Ben Hewitt

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher. — John Holt

I always like to learn, but I don't always like to be taught. — Winston Churchill

When you get down to it, unschooling is really just a fancy term for 'life' or 'growing up uninstitutionalized'. — Grace Llewellyn

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

Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Of course you cannot keep a wife-
Everyone's got to live their life! — Kristen McKee

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

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was "bad",
Her Papa loved her anyway. — Kristen McKee

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

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun! — Kristen McKee

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

Many of the world's greatest geniuses all had in common that they were pulled from the school environment. They were freed to discover the undiscovered. They had the imagination to 'see' a different way and the drive to try to build what they had seen. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

When people say that school prepares children for the real world, what's implied is that it is the difficult parts of school (doing things you don't want to do, forced interaction with peers, following rules that you don't believe in) that are important. What's implied is that the real world is going to be an unhappy place and that being treated unfairly by people is a part of life.
It may be a part of life in school, but it is not a part of our lives. School is as far away from the real world as possible. In school we learn that we cannot control our own destinies and that it is acceptable to let others govern our lives. In the real world we can take responsibility for choosing our own paths and governing our own lives. The real world is what we make it. — Rue Kream

Of all the things I have learned since becoming a parent(and sometimes, it feels as if this might be everything I've learned), perhaps the hardest to accept is that it is selfish and possibly even dangerous to desire particular outcomes for our children. — Ben Hewitt

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

John Taylor Gatto's extraordinary book, Dumbing Us Down. Check out Mary Griffith's The Unschooling Handbook and Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Take a look at Home Education Magazine and its website. — Daniel H. Pink

My goal has always been to inspire in them an ongoing love of learning. To awaken a feeling where their work is their passion, so that they never feel burdened or trapped by meeting their material needs, but instead thrive and experience wealth doing what they love while making a positive contribution to the world. To me that is the truest definition of success. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

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

This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."
It is the creed of a slave. — John Holt

I simply stepped out of the way and maintained my courage and my position in the face of constant disagreement, voiced opinion and attack. I held true and I stood my ground. I maintained my convictions and my commitment to allowing them to live in the kingdom of childhood. I protected them from outside influence and allowed their imaginations to soar. I instilled a lifelong love of learning in them and I shared my passion for reading. I allowed them to choose what they wanted to study and I provided the resources for them to delve in, unguided and undisturbed for however long they needed to gather what they believed to be enough understanding to satisfy their own personal drive. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. — Jiddu Krishnamurti