Unschooling Quotes

• 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. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better , if less "showily." Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.

  Anne Sullivan Macy

  Children, Real, Teaching

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• It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

  John Taylor Gatto

  Life, Education, Teacher

  "Why Schools Don't Educate". John Taylor Gatto's New York City Teacher of the Year Acceptance Speech, www.naturalchild.org. January 31, 1990.

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• Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

  Plato

  Wisdom, Plato, Educational

  Plato (1977). “The Portable Plato”, p.349, Penguin

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• Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds.

  Plato

  Education, Children, Teaching

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• 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; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

  Albert Einstein

  Education, Mistake, Teaching

  Albert Einstein (2008). “The Essential Einstein: His Greatest Works”, Penguin Group(CA)

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

  Oscar Wilde

  Graduation, Education, Time

  Epigrams: Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young Sebastian Melmoth

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• There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

  William Glasser

  Funny, Jobs, Learning

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

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, Learning, School

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt McLaughlin (2010). “The Laws of Nature: Excerpts from the Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.34, North Atlantic Books

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• Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

  Arthur Koestler

  Inspiring, Teacher, Educational

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• A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

  George Santayana

  Education, Teacher, Children

  George Santayana (1950). “Atoms of Thought: An Anthology of Thoughts”

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• We must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

  Tom Peters

  Teaching, Reform, Conformity

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• Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

  Beatrix Potter

  Education, Memorable, Learning

  Beatrix Potter (2005). “Beatrix Potter: Artist & Illustrator”, Frederick Warne Publishers

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• Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

  Henry Adams

  Education, Teaching, Ignorance

  'The Education of Henry Adams' (1907) ch. 25

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• The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

  Alvin Toffler

  Inspirational, Change, Positive

  "Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, dies aged 87". www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2016.

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• I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

  Anne Sullivan Macy

  Education, Children, Learning

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• 

  Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

  Pablo Picasso

  Inspirational, Motivational, Leadership

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Educational, Learning

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden”, p.41, Booklassic

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• Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Education, Learning

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• The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.

  Noam Chomsky

  Weed, Educational, Learning

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky”, p.111, The New Press

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• School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

  John Updike

  Funny, Education, Witty

  1963 The Centaur, ch.4.

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• The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

  H. L. Mencken

  Education, Learning, Liberty

  The American Mercury Magazine, April 24, 1924.

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• The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.

  Jules Henry

  Education, Children, Fall

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• If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself

  Alexander Sutherland Neill

  Education, Teacher, Feelings

  Alexander Sutherland Neill (1953). “The Free Child”

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• 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

  Jobs, Children, Teaching

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• I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

  Aleister Crowley

  Education, Memories, Philosophical

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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