Here you’ll find one of the best collections of unschooling quotes to inspire you to embrace your love of learning:
"Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach."
"Those who can’t “teach,” “administrate.”
“Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.” ~ Grace Llewellyn
"Learning is not a product of teaching. Kids are born learning. They learn how to walk, how to talk. They’re basically little scientists. If we don’t stop that process, it will continue." ~ Grace Llewellyn
“Your life, time, and brain should belong to you, not to an institution.” ~ Grace Llewellyn
“In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: forget about it. Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it. One day, you will glance up at your collection of Japanese literature, or trip over the solar oven you built, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself.” ~ Grace Llewellyn
"Schools are obsolete." ~ Sugata Mitra
"Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality." Thomas Sowell
"If a single teacher can’t teach all the subjects, then how can you expect a single student to learn all the subjects?"
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ~ Joseph Campbell
"Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls." ~ Joseph Campbell
“The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.” ~ Rita Mae Brown
“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
“We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process, and you can not predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is, like a farmer, create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.” ~ Sir Ken Robinson
“Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not - because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.” ~ Sir Ken Robinson
"The world isn’t divided up into separate subjects. Subjects are an invention of schooling." ~ Sir Ken Robinson
“If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.” ~ William Irwin Thompson
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ~ William Butler Yeats
“If we don’t model what we teach, we are teaching something else.” ~ Abraham Maslow
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” ~ Frederick Douglass
“If you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take.” ~ Lewis Carroll, [Alice in Wonderland]
“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
“Depression is when your favorite thoughts and feelings go on vacation without you. Don’t worry. Wherever they went, they’re probably having a really good time.” ~ Shaun Roundy
“Think, feel, be, do, have. That’s how life works, in that order.” ~ Shaun Roundy
“If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would create something like a classroom.” ~ John J. Medina, Author of the New York Times Bestseller, [Brain Rules]
“In my clinical experience, the greatest block to a person’s development is his having to take on a way of life which is not rooted in his own powers.” ~ Rollo May
“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” ~ Lawrence Peter
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” ~ Stephen Covey
“We are not creatures of circumstance; we are creators of circumstance.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
“Forced association is not socialization.” - Adele Carroll
"Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world of conformists.” ~ Nikola Tesla
“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” ~ Voltaire
“My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.” ~ Margaret Mead
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” ~ Alexander Den Heijer
“Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” ~ John Dewey [The Father of American Education]
"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." ~ John Dewey [The Father of American Education]
“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” ~ John Dewey [The Father of American Education]
"You can’t make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." ~ John Dewey [The Father of American Education]
"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]
"If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all." ~ Pearl S. Buck
“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler
“All the world is my school and all humanity is my teacher.” ~ George Whitman
“Birds fly, fish swim, and children play.” ~ Garry L. Landreth, [Play Therapy: The Art of the Relationship]
“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” ~ George Santayana
“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” ~ Pablo Picasso
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~ Pablo Picasso
“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake.” ~ Francis Bacon
“Education: free and compulsory – what a way to learn logic!” ~ Frank van Dun
“The smartest of a large number of hamsters is still a hamster.” ~ Fred Reed
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” ~ Steve Jobs
“It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child’s curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.” ~ Alice Miller
“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.” ~ Frank Zappa
“The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.” ~ Tony Robbins
"Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only." ~ Bell Hooks
“I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.” ~ Claude Monet
“Most people, most of the time, learn most of what they know about science and technology outside of school.” ~ National Science Foundation
“The future of education is over the internet.” ~ NIA (National Inflation Association)
“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
“The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.” ~ Bob Moawad
“If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could be better changed in ourselves.” ~ C.G. Jung
“The idea that people should study for about 12 years and then start living is more deeply seated in our culture than many people realize.” ~ Larry and Susan Kaseman
“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity.” ~ Erik Erikson
“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
"I would say that living an interesting life is more instructive than formal learning could ever be." ~ Lesley Clark
"There should be no more pressure on a child to learn than there is on a rose to grow. I can’t coerce a rosebud to open its petals and bloom before its time. It simply unfolds on its own. But even before it buds, one can tell that a rose is a rose, distinct and unique." ~ Debra Elramey
"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." ~ Peggy Pirro
"How colorfully and scientifically our generation talks down to the little child!
What insipid, stupid, dull stories are trotted out…
We don’t respect the children’s thinking or let them come to any conclusions themselves!
We ply them with endless questions, the ones we’ve thought up, instead of being silent and letting the child’s questions bubble up with interest." ~ S Schaeffer Macaulay: For the Children’s Sake
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." Benjamin Franklin
"It’s amazing what kids can accomplish without shackles." ~ Jim Babb
"College isn’t the place to go for ideas." ~ Helen Keller
“Life is an exciting adventure, or it is nothing.” ~ Hellen Keller
"We, the people, are teaching ourselves" ~ Linda Dobson
“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
"Parents can’t choose the mates of their children or the behavior of their children. You actually can’t choose anything for your children without disempowering them." ~ Ester Hicks
"I don’t know how well this will translate, but it occurred to me that the people with no certificates (hackers) were breaking into the systems the people with certificates (professionals with degrees) have been building for years.
What does this tell us about the value of certificates and degrees? Not that they have no value, that’s silly, but it does seem to suggest the value of the piece of paper is the least significant part of the person wielding the skillset."
"It’s a tragedy how badly some people are brainwashed into believing an institutionalized setting akin to the prison system is the only way a child will grow up to be a “functioning adult.”
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” ~ Steve Jobs
"The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things." ~ Jean Piaget
“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society…But for me, education means making creators…You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.” ~ Jean Piaget
“When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” ~ Jean Piaget
“Children learn how to speak by listening to others speak. They learn how to converse by watching and listening to others converse. They learn how to hold books by watching other people hold books.” ~ Becca Challman
“Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.” ~ Lillian Smith
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ~ Stanley Kubrik
“Homeschooling is not about sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of textbooks all day, recreating school in the isolation of the home. (Unless, for some reason, you want it to be.) For many–maybe most–families, homeschooling is about getting out and about. It is about opening to possibilities, about finding learning opportunities around every corner, and about having the ‘luxury’ of making the kinds of community connections that are sustaining and enjoyable. It is about exploring the world with open eyes and minds, trying new things, going new places, meeting new people. It is a veritable kaleidoscope of experiences that provide a unique educational path for every child–and parent. You can find or create anything you want, and have a blast doing it.” ~ Shay Seaborne
“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” ~ Beatrix Potter
”Today for Show and Tell, I’ve brought a tiny marvel of nature: a single snowflake. I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water, just like every other one, when you bring it in the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I’ll be leaving you drips and going outside.” ~ Calvin, from Calvin & Hobbes Comic
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.” ~ Henry Adams
“Growing up, I couldn’t understand the confusion. Wasn’t it obvious that I could learn math and physics if I wanted to? Couldn’t my uncle see that I had no use for chemistry but that if I did, I’d learn it? Why did anyone care, anyway? And why did people ask me if I knew math and English but they didn’t ask whether I knew about good nutrition or how to shingle a roof?” ~ Sarabeth Matilsky
“Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see from families who have homeschooled their kids from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life.” ~ Judy Garvey in GWS
“Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created ‘dangerous,’ free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.” ~ Laurie A. Couture
“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“Learning never exhausts the mind.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci
"Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets." ~ Leonardo da Vinci
“Going to school is rarely a choice at all, but rather just the thing you do because everyone else does it.” ~ Brian Huskie, [A White Rose: A Soldier’s Story of Love, War, and School]
“How many of us have read history, and shook our heads and puffed our chest, and said, “If I were alive during that period, I would never have done those things to those people!” Yet here we are, doing those things to those people.” ~ Brian Huskie, [A White Rose: A Soldier’s Story of Love, War, and School]
“I tend to agree with Robert Frost when he says, ‘Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.’ By this definition, I don’t think anyone can claim that we are successfully educating this next generation.” ~ Brian Huskie, [A White Rose: A Soldier’s Story of Love, War, and School]
“Maybe you’ve noticed what I’ve noticed, and thought it strange, or dismissed it as youthful foolishness or that you were missing some critical piece of information that would reveal itself with age and wisdom – that is: every single teacher believes feverishly in the importance of the content of their class, and furthermore, believes that their assessment of you in their class is a direct measure of your capacity for future success, while simultaneously not having a clue as to the content of virtually any other discipline in the school. They will boldly state things like, That’s math, I’m an English teacher or That’s literature, I’m a biology teacher, practically admitting out loud that nothing learned in school is important (except, of course, the course they are teaching).” ~ Brian Huskie, [A White Rose: A Soldier’s Story of Love, War, and School]
“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]
“The most important question I ask myself as a parent is this. How can I best help my children be fully themselves and happy with who they are in the world, however they show up.” ~ Lehla Eldridge, [Jump, Fall, Fly, From Schooling to Homeschooling to Unschooling]
“I no longer believe that the current education system is able to equip our children for a fast-moving future. Technology has evolved so rap-idly in the last five years that to put a child in an education system that was designed for a future that will most likely no longer exist for the majority, seems almost absurd.” ~ Lehla Eldridge, [JUMP, FALL, FLY From Schooling to Homeschooling to Unschooling]
“If the educational system can claim anything consistently it would be that it is masterful at evoking a destructive axis of boredom and anxiety accounting for the increasing levels of mental health problems in young people.” ~ Anthony Eldridge-Rogers, [Jump, Fall, Fly, From Schooling to Homeschooling to Unschooling]
“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”
~ William Blake, [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]
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“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, [The Unschooling Unmanual]
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“Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this.” ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, [99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child’s Classroom]
“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, [99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child’s Classroom]
“The simplest description is that Unschooling means a way of bringing up children using free play and child-directed activity to develop the child’s own individual talents and creativity by supportively following up the child’s own interests – without coercion, compulsion, manipulation, regimentation, constant testing and grading and rank-ordering, or top-down authoritarianism.” ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, [99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child’s Classroom]
“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, [99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child’s Classroom]
“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, [Born To Learn]
“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, [Born To Learn]
“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, [Born To Learn]
“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
"Humans learn best when they are self-motivated. When they feel their chosen task is meaningful and important and worth their time." ~ Lori McWilliam Pickert
“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
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“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
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“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
“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, [101 Reasons Why I Am An Unschooler]
“Many parents aren’t all that accustomed to being patient and present for their kids anymore, if only because they’re simply not given the opportunity to be patient and present. Jobs get in the way. School gets in the way. After-school activities get in the way. As I have learned—as I am still learning—patience and presence are muscles that must be developed and exercised regularly.” ~ Ben Hewitt, [Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World]
“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, [Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World]
“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
“If there is value in the standardized, performance-based curriculums utilized by the vast majority of schools, that value is realized primarily by the institutions themselves and by the economic and social structures that are fed by standardized learning.” ~ Ben Hewitt, [Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World]
“the business of being a child in this country is rapidly disappearing into an abyss that consists not only of programs and tests but also of extracurricular activities.” ~ Ben Hewitt, [Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World]
“What if the point were not to know as much as possible but to feel as much as possible?” ~ Ben Hewitt, [Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World]