Why do people choose unschooling as a way of learning?
Here are 13 reasons why not to go to school: Aside from the fact it is a complete waste of our two most valuable assets in life: time and energy. Your life is determined by how you manage these two assets so ask yourself if you’re truly spending your time and energy wisely or are you wasting your most important assets being a cog in the machine?
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” ~ Henry Ford
“If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents-start charging for it.” ~ Kim Garst
“The secret of life is to waste time in ways that you like.” ~ Jerry Seinfeld
“If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.” ~ Mario Andretti, 1994
“The number of the hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. It is our most precious resource. The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become. The more we blame others or external circumstances, the more negative and compromised our energy is likely to be.” ~ Jim Loehr
“I doubt there has ever been a human culture…that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today.” ~ Peter Gray
“The only difference between a RICH person and a POOR person is how they use their time.” ~ Robert Kiyosaki
“Average people kill time, but exceptional people invest it.” ~ Chuck Canady
“If you haven’t time to help youngsters find the right way in life, somebody with more time will help them find the wrong way.” ~ Frank A. Clark
“You are your worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you’re only half involved in what you do.” ~ Robert Greene
“No loss should be more regrettable to us than losing our time, for it’s irretrievable." ~ Zeno of Citium
“Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.” ~ John Dewey
“Limit yourself to the present.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
1) Indoctrination | School is indoctrination, not education. Indoctrination is the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically and that is exactly what schools do. Schools don’t teach kids to question things, they tell them to accept things for the way they are. Parents want to ensure their kids are learning what they want to learn, not what some stranger forces them to learn. Parents don’t want their kids to be brainwashed as schools are not educating kids, they are indoctrinating them. There is nothing schools offer that you cannot learn on your own! The very nature of school means you are trading your limited time on this planet to sit in classrooms when there is so much more to explore and learn in the real world than from a teacher in a classroom. Besides, who really wants to learn from someone who has been schooled in this system for a quarter of their lives and then decides to become a teacher and never ever leaves this system of oppression because they themselves are stuck in it? The Teachers Curse! Teachers are obsessed with trying to reproduce academic clones of themselves. The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest labor union and professional interest group in the United States.
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3) Rights | Coercion is NOT Consent! The entire schooling industry profits off coercing children, that’s why it’s compulsory. Children have no rights at schools and are expected to follow an endless number of rules that ensure obedience to authority. It’s so bad that kids don’t even have the right to go to the bathroom in schools without having to ask permission from authority. Can you believe it? That’s because kids in schools are literally slaves without any rights.
“Parents give up their rights when they drop their children off at public school.” ~ Melinda Harmon, Federal Judge, 1996
“How do we expect to teach kids about consent when many spend their childhoods under coercion?” ~ Kerry McDonald
“All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.” ~ Grace Llewellyn
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” ~ William Pitt
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4) Values | The culture of schools impart very poor values on children such as Materialism instead of Self-Worth, Competition instead of Cooperation, and Sexualization.
“If you don’t pass your values on to your kids, someone else will.” ~ Frank Sonnenberg
“Double standards are the standard for people who don’t have any standards.”
“One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
“It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.” ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards - wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity - come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.” ~ Naval
“Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write and count. It is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace that is right for each individual child. Earlier is not better” ~ Magda Gerber
“Education should not be a competition resulting in winners and losers. Education should be a competition against ignorance, and all should be encouraged to win.” ~ K.A. Brill
“Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves.” ~ E. Joseph Cossman
“Nature is based on harmony. So it says if we want to survive and become more like nature, then we actually have to understand that it’s cooperation versus competition.” ~ Bruce Lipton
“Cooperation, not conflict,” writes anthropologist Ashley Montagu, “has been the most valuable form of behavior for human beings taken at any stage of their evolutionary history. Without the cooperation of its members, society cannot survive.” ~ Dr. Thomas Lickona, RAISING GOOD CHILDREN (NY: Bantam, 1983, p.22O)
“The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.” ~ Ayn Rand
“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” ~ Albert Einstein
"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” ~ M. Scott Peck, [The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth]
“If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents–start charging for it.” ~ Kim Garst
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
“The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.” ~ Fred Astaire
“People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason the world is in chaos, is because things are being loved and people are being used.”
“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.” ~ John Taylor Gatto, [Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling]
"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“There’s a theory that says that life is based on a competition and the struggle and the fight for survival, and it’s interesting because when you look at the fractal character of evolution, it’s totally different. It’s based on cooperation among the elements in the geometry and not competition.” ~ Bruce Lipton
“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.” ~ Arie de Geus
“Do not seek to surpass others, seek to surpass yourself.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, [Roman politician and philosopher, 106 - 43 BC]
“The more you learn to live without, the more you’ll have to live with.” ~ Frank A. Clark
“Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.” ~ J. Gresham Machen
“Modern education is competitive, nationalistic and separative. It has trained the child to regard material values as of major importance, to believe that his nation is also of major importance and superior to other nations and peoples. The general level of world information is high but usually biased, influenced by national prejudices, serving to make us citizens of our nation but not of the world.” ~ Albert Einstein
“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.” ~ Carl Rogers
“Artificial learning takes what is simple and natural and turns it into a complex array of objectives, goals, measurements, administrators, supervisors, counselors, and transportation experts. Natural education requires only a guide providing direction, and a learner ready to discover and create goals and values that are personally meaningful.” ~ Linda Dobson
Compete with Yourself Cooperate with Others
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5) Individuality | A Free Spirit is a person who thinks and acts in an uninhibited way without worrying about normal social rules: nonconformist. Schooling kills a child’s free spirit which leads to a complete lack of individual expression.
“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
“Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus.” ~ Naval
“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” ~ George S. Patton
“Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing.” ~ Madeline Hunter
“The first duty of a man is to think for himself” ~ Jose Marti
“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, day and night, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” ~ E.E. Cummings
“You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.” ~ Marilyn Howshall
“If you live life on your own terms it shouldn’t feel like a jail cell.” ~ Shannon L Alder
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are." ~ Søren Kierkegaard
“I am well aware that what has annoyed many people most about my children’s education is the idea of any child not being exactly ‘like all the others’ - although what there is about ‘the others’ to make this desirable I have never been able to see.” ~ Joy Baker [Children in Chancery, 1964]
“The reason so many people are opting out of education is that it doesn’t feed their spirit. It doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.” ~ Sir Ken Robinson
“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” ~ Carl Jung
“No one achieves great things by following the crowd. Have a spine. Strike your own path.” ~ Robert Kiyosaki
“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler
“Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations.” ~ John Dewey [The Father of American Education]
“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.” ~ John Ruskin
“The school system is designed to teach obedience and conformity and prevent the child’s natural capacities from developing.” ~ Noam Chomsky
"I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn people: “Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, ‘There is no “I” in team.’ What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an “I” in independence, individuality and integrity.’” ~ George Carlin
“Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.” ~ Martin Seligman
“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” ~ Ayn Rand
“I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“I found out there weren’t too many limitations, if I did things my way.” ~ Johnny Cash
"People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, when there are five of them or ten or even groups of smallest two, they begin to change, they sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group.” ~ George Carlin
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6) Experience | Schools completely deprive kids of the top four things they need in life: love, self care, connecting with nature, and free play. Kids learn from real world experience, not schooling. Schools do not set kids up for the real world, but actually do the exact opposite, significantly limits a child’s opportunity to learn in the real world limiting their real world experiences. Unschooling opens a child’s imagination to a world of different possibilities and allows them the freedom to pursue their passions engaging in activities that are meaningful to them. Schools are prisons that not only mentally enslave the minds of children, but also physically enslave them by forcing them to sit for long periods of time, spending hours and hours locked inside classrooms instead of playing in nature or actually experiencing the real world. School constrains learning, that is its purpose. It’s time to start living and learning outside the box! The truth is that there’s no substitute for real world experience!
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7) Bullying | According to the National Bullying Prevention Center, “One of every 5 students reports being bullied!” The Netflix show “13 Reasons Why” shows the emotional drama and bullying that are all too common at schools and how it affects everyone, even those who you don’t think would be affected. The whole culture of school is based on bullying from the top down, forcing kids to do things that they would not do naturally takes away their free choice, so it’s not surprising they act out by bullying others kids because this is exactly what schools are teaching them. This is why John Holt said the following:
“Birds fly, fish swim, man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can (to them); give children as much help and guidance as they ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.” ~ John Holt, “How Children Learn”
“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, [How Children Fail]
“The only time most people will experience violence in their lives is in government schools.” ~ Michael Malice
“Compulsion – nonconsensual education – requires violence; it requires complete control over what students put into their brain, the people they are exposed to, the places they are authorized to be, and oftentimes, with free lunch programs, what food goes into their body. Compulsory systems are resentful of families who do not enforce homework or dress code policies; are reluctant to allow parents into its buildings except once or twice a year on special “open house” days; and fear parents who choose to homeschool.” ~ Brian Huskie, [A White Rose: A Soldier’s Story of Love, War, and School]
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8) Politics | Schools are not apolitical and they could never be, most everyone working at schools are completely absorbed by politics. The entire school system and curriculum is a result of politics. The great thing about unschooling is that it is apolitical, unschoolers can rightfully choose whether to engage in politics or not. Unschooling attracts all political parties including libertarians and anarchists. When schools lean one way or another, which they all do, they become indoctrination centers for a particular political party. The reality is that most faculty are more like political activists than real unbiased teachers. If you can’t think beyond your political affiliation, you’ve already lost control of your mind!
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9) Motivation | Schools are all about rewards and punishments which is extrinsic motivation, but intrinsic motivation is what truly drives us, especially to our passions, interests, success, and happiness.
“Compulsory school environment induces learned helplessness, anxiety, depression. It also inhibits creativity and it inhibits empathy.” ~ Cevin Soling
“Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Many well behaved children are not truly self-regulated; They are afraid.” ~ Iris Chin
“Coercive schooling is not good for children. 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
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10) Entrepreneurship | Parents that want to raise entrepreneurs love unschooling because it encourages all the building blocks of success. Children who are empowered are more much more likely to start their own businesses. Whereas schools make good employees that will feel comfortable with a job in a cubicle, unschooling creates entrepreneurs.
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” ~ Jim Rohn
"I didn’t fail school, school failed me.
School fails entrepreneurs everyday,
because it’s not built for entrepreneurs,
it’s built for workers." ~ Gary Vaynerchuk
“Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.” ~ Unknown Author
“Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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11) Family | Many parents are still recovering and deschooling from all the damage schooling caused them so they don’t want to force their children into the same system of abuse. Schooling promotes the complete destruction of the family. If you think it’s too difficult to educate your own child(ren), imagine how impossible it is for a complete stranger to “educate” 25 children. This is why school is a daycare, not a natural learning environment.
“Don’t question your ability to teach your child. Question putting your child into the same institution that left you questioning your ability to teach your child.”
“The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence.” ~ Rosamunde Pilcher
“No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent.” ~ Bob Keeshan
“Children learn more from what you are, than what you teach.” ~ W.E.B. Du Bois
“There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.” ~ Gandhi
“Family is the most important thing in the world.” ~ Princess Diana
“For many of us, parenting has been filled with struggle. There is a better way. You don’t have to learn it. You already know it. You only have to trust it.” ~ William Martin
“The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.” ~ Frank A. Clark
“The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home.” ~ William Temple
“We’ve seen the evidence that shows how harmful control is to children and their development. That evidence resides not only in research, but also in our own experiences as children and adults.” ~ Teresa Graham Brett
“The most potent force for change…is the growing recognition of millions of adults that their own impoverished expectations and frustrations came, in large measure, from their schooling.” ~ Marilyn Ferguson
“Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; The ones who accept you for what you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile; And who love you no matter what.” ~ Unknown
“Before you go and criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them.” ~ Unknown
”No amount of money or success can take the place of time spent with your family” ~ Unknown
“If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them and half as much money.” ~ Abigail Van Buren
“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family.” ~ Anthony Brandt
“Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid away at his or her most formative years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise that the state, through its agents, knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you do.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
“I feel to warn you that one of the chief means of misleading our youth and destroying the family unit is our educational institutions.” ~ Ezra Taft Benson, [The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, P. 307]
“Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of it’s worth and will have the courage to defend it.” ~ Joaquim Nabuco
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12) Free Play
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13) Discrimination | People choose to empower their kids by unschooling them for this very reason because of major disparities in schooling across the nation such as Institutional Systemic Racism. Schools manufacture and manifest discrimination based on Race, Religion, Class, Gender, and Age (Ageism) which are all widespread in schools.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ~ Nelson Mandela, [Long Walk to Freedom]
“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.” ~ J.K. Rowling [Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire]
“All for one and one for all, united we stand divided we fall.” ~ Alexandre Dumas [The Three Musketeers]
“Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
“Great minds see unity whereas small minds see division.” ~ Wald Wassermann
“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.” ~ Thomas Sowell
“Don’t ever let people tell you who you should be based on your age” ~ Agon Hare
“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are FREE, they are NOT EQUAL. And if they are EQUAL, they are NOT FREE.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn