Great Quotes About Homeschooling, Self-Education, and School

Is formal education necessary for success in the twenty-first century? A growing number of homeschooling families around the world argue that it isn’t, especially for children. In fact, many would say that institutionalized learning could actually be harmful to a child’s development. It strips the child’s love of learning, sense of self, confidence, and ability to think creatively. Homeschooling is not for everyone, but many children are able thrive in such an environment where true learning is valued above rote memorization.

Many of history’s greatest thinkers did poorly in school or shunned public education entirely for their own forms of homeschooling, and today’s homeschooling parents also have some insightful things to say about the subject. These quotes will be helpful to families seeking support for their beliefs, as well as to introduce ideas about school, education, childhood, different ways to learn, etc., to those who aren’t familiar with homeschooling.

How do children learn two very difficult skills, walking and talking, without anyone’s making a self-conscious effort to teach them? Could children learn other things, even “school” subjects like reading and math, in the same way, by imitating other people’s behavior, making mistakes, correcting them on their own, and asking for help when they need it? –Larry and Susan Kaseman, in Taking Charge Through Homeschooling

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

Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be “taught” if they are to learn. . . . Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I’m angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own. –Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review

Concerns that homeschooled children are marginalized in terms of opportunities for socialization are generally addressed by homeschooling parents and homeschool support groups through the provision of additional social activities. Not one report in this study suggested that a greater emphasis on social interactions would be beneficial. –ERO, The Quality of Home Schooling

Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child must learn. In a public school environment, the teacher must be certified, but the child need not learn. –Gene Royer

For many parents, homeschooling is a matter of heart and belief; they feel deeply and strongly that they should be homeschooling. They sometimes start homeschooling with only this conviction to go on, unsure of exactly how they will proceed, and they work out practical details and solve problems as they go along. –Larry and Susan Kaseman, in “Taking Charge Through Homeschooling”-Mark Twain

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. –John Holt in How Children Learn

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

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

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities. –Jonathan Kozol

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

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

Children grow up believing that life is like school, with every question having an answer in the back of the book. Maturity consists in recognizing that life is a continuing series of multiple choice questions with the answers torn out of the back of the book. –Sydney Harris

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. –Seymour Papert

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