"We must teach our children not to spend their money a dollar at a time. If you spend your money a dollar at a time, you’ll wind up with trinkets instead of treasures. You can’t buy much of value a dollar at a time." ~ Jim Rohn
“Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.” ~ Jim Rohn
“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” ~ Jim Rohn
"If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." ~ Jim Rohn
"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune." ~ Jim Rohn
“Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.” ~ Jim Rohn
"Life is “trying things to see if they work.” ~ Ray Bradbury
"Thinking is a subject that is not taught in school - yet it’s the highest function that we’re capable of…" ~ Bob Proctor
"What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you." ~ Anthony de Mello (Priest, spirituality author, and speaker)
"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." ~ Oscar Wilde
“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“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
“Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“The best way to make children good is to make them happy.” ~ Oscar Wilde
"Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers." ~ Anthony Robbins
“He didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.” ~ Clarence Budington Kelland, American writer (1881-1964), about his father
"What luck for rulers that men do not think" ~ Adolf Hitler
"Every form of education, whether its private schooling, public government schooling, or home based education is the teaching, training, and indoctrination of children." ~ Dr. Brian Ray
“No one, of any age, at any time, responds well to being controlled—or patronized. Control triggers one of two responses: rebellion or submission, accompanied by various less than healthy coping mechanisms. It might “work” in the short run, but it’s bound to backfire over time.” ~ Jennifer Lehr
"You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar" ~ Nietzsche “Human, All Too Human”
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” ~ Doris Lessing
“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” ~ Doris Lessing, [The Golden Notebook]
"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
"Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus." ~ Naval
"Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will." ~ Joseph Goebbels
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of” – Edward Bernays
"Public education has not produced an educated public." ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
"The chief object of education is not to learn but unlearn." ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.” [1]—Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes. (Story by John W. Whitehead, republished from Rutherford.org.)
"Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are our most important work." ~ C.S. Lewis
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things which gives value to survival.” ~ C. S. Lewis
“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” ~ C.S. Lewis
"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it." ~ Richard L Evans
“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, “Voltaire’s Bastards”
"The system cannot be fixed by the system." ~ Tom Morello
“The pinnacle of productivity is to never work; always play.” ~ Marianne Williamson
"There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children." ~ Marianne Williamson
“Self-directed learning does not mean no adult involvement. It means no adult force/control.” ~ Carol Black
“There is something profoundly deadening to a curious, engaged child about the feeling of being watched and measured, or even, some studies suggest, the anticipation of being measured.” ~ Carol Black
“What I always tell kids? The world is nothing like school. The world has ten thousand pathways. The world appreciates energy, independence.” ~ Carol Black
“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.” ~ Carol Black
“If you’re a ‘nice’ teacher, and you’re not 100% clear that most of your students are in your room by force, under threat of punishment, up to and including the use of police power, you’re gaslighting them. You can only freely choose what you’re free to walk away from.” ~ Carol Black
“If [kids] aren’t making mistakes, they’re not learning.” ~ Jim Fitzgerald
"One good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters." ~ George Herbert Palmer
"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." ~ Abraham Lincoln
“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 go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience.” ~ Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller’s mentor and friend)
“No man is free who is not a master of himself.” ~ Epictetus (Phrygian slave and Stoic philosopher | AD 55 – 135)
"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." ~ Epictetus (Phrygian slave and Stoic philosopher | AD 55 – 135)
“The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.” Epictetus (Phrygian slave and Stoic philosopher | AD 55 – 135)
“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” ~ Tom Bodett
“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.” ~ Antisthenes
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty." ~ Henry Ford
"Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere." ~ Chinese Proverb
"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education." ~ Sir Walter Scott
"The best education consists in immunising people against systematic attempts at education" ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend
“You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.” ~ Marilyn Howshall
"Disobedience is not an issue if obedience is not the goal" ~ Daron Quinlan
"Changing the game of school means actually allowing students to create their own game. This is empowerment." ~ John Spencer & A.J. Juliani
"The lifelong success of children is based on their ability to be creative and to apply the lessons learned from playing." ~ American Academy of Pediatrics
"Constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination." ~ Joyce Carol Oates (American Writer)
"The great enemy of writing isn’t lack of talent, it’s being interrupted by other people." ~ Joyce Carol Oates (American Writer)
“Most of life’s problems are because of two reasons: we act without thinking or we think without acting.” ~ Unknown
"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." ~ Galileo Galilei
"Real, natural learning is in the living. It’s in the observing, the questioning, the examining, the pondering, the analyzing, the watching, the reading, the DO-ing, the living, the breathing, the loving, the JOY. It’s in the joy." ~ Anne Ohman
"I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there." ~ Petronius, Satyricon
"[Schools:] vast factories for the manufacture of robots." ~ Robert Lindner (1914-1956)
“It’s not our life that determines how we live, it’s how we LIVE that determines our life.” ~ Sallie Felton
"The only time most people will experience violence in their lives is in government schools." ~ Michael Malice
"All restraints upon man’s natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree." ~ Lysander Spooner
“There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure…The intrinsic nature of the power authorized was so little realized that this was called “free education,” the most absolute contradiction of facts by terminology of which the language is capable. Everything about such schools is compulsory, not free ” ~ Isabel Paterson
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William Pitt
“One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.” ~ Shannon L. Alder
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
"A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing." ~ Founder of pioneering democratic free school Summerhill, A.S. Neill, wrote in his 1960 book
“The reason that kids need to learn to read so early in school is because in school kids read about doing stuff instead of doing stuff. When kids live life outside of school they actually get to do stuff, so it’s not as important to read about it in order to learn.” ~ Lisa Nielsen
“All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.” ~ John Stuart Mill, [On Liberty, 1859]
Teacher Certifications are Unnecessary
“It would be giving too dangerous a power to governments, were they allowed to exclude any one from professions, even from the profession of teacher, for alleged deficiency of qualifications: and I think, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, that degrees, or other public certificates of scientific or professional acquirements, should be given to all who present themselves for examination, and stand the test; but that such certificates should confer no advantage over competitors, other than the weight which may be attached to their testimony by public opinion.” ~ John Stuart Mill, [On Liberty, 1859]
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ~ Voltaire
“Common sense is not so common.” ~ Voltaire, [A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary]
“Dare to think for yourself.” ~ Voltaire
“Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.” ~ Voltaire, [Philosophical Dictionary]
“It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.” ~ Voltaire
“Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her; but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.” ~ Voltaire
“No amount of security is worth the suffering of a mediocre life chained to a routine that has killed your dreams.” ~ Maya Mendoza
"While our society is busy wondering and theorizing about what children need most, Mother Nature simply holds a space for the child to discover that for themselves." ~ Nicolette Sowder
“Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.” ~ Erin K. Kenny, [Forest Kindergartens: The Cedarsong Way]
“Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. They were not sent away from home each day to a place just for children but lived, learned, worked, and played in the real world, alongside adults and other children of all ages.” ~ Rachel Gathercole, [The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling]
“Children are not things to be molded, but are people to be unfolded.” ~ Jess Lair
“Remember: everyone in the classroom has a story that leads to misbehavior or defiance. 9 times out of 10, the story behind the misbehavior won’t make you angry. It will break your heart.” ~ Annette Breaux
“The trouble with over-structuring is that it discourages exploration.” ~ Jay Giedd, Neuroscientist, University of California
“The more risks you allow your children to make, the better they learn to look after themselves.” ~ Roald Dahl
“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.” ~ Roald Dahl, [My Uncle Oswald]
"Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school." ~ Melinda Harmon, Federal Judge, 1996
“We are raised in a culture that values expertise over exploration.” ~ Nina Wise
“Kids deserve the right to think that they can change the world.” ~ Lois Lowry
“Children more than ever, need opportunities to be in their bodies in the world – jumping rope, bicycling, stream hopping, and fort building. It’s this engagement between limbs of the body and bones of the earth where true balance and centeredness emerge.” ~ David Sobel
“In this modern world where activity is stressed to the point of mania, quietness as a childhood need is too often overlooked.” ~ Margaret Wise Brown
“When we give children advice or instant solutions, we deprive them of the experience that comes from wrestling with their own problems.” ~ Adele Faber
“Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child’s soul.” ~ Friedrich Froebel
“So often children are punished for being human. Children are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes. Yet, us adults have them all the time. None of us are perfect. We must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves.” ~ Rebecca Eanes
“When my kids become wild and unruly, I use a nice safe playpen. When they’re finished, I climb out.” ~ Erma Bombeck
“No significant learning occurs without a significant relationship.” ~ James Comer
“Instead of teaching children to get ‘there’, why not let them be here? Where is ‘there’ anyway? The world needs more ‘here’ than ‘there’.” ~ Vince Gowmon
“Ask any child development expert, and they will tell you that children do not develop in a straight line. There are no average children. There are no standard children.” ~ Cassi Clausen
“The activities that are the easiest, cheapest, and most fun to do – such as singing, playing games, reading, storytelling, and just talking and listening – are also the best for child development.” ~ Jerome Singer
“The moment I decided to follow instead of lead, I discovered the joys of becoming part of a small child’s world.” ~ Janet Gonzalez-Mena
“It’s not so much what children learn through play, but what they won’t learn if we don’t give them the chance to play. Many functional skills like literacy and arithmetic can be learned either through play or through instruction – the issue is the amount of stress on the child. However, many coping skills like compassion, self-regulation, self-confidence, the habit of active engagement, and the motivation to learn and be literate cannot be instructed. They can only be learned through self-directed experience (i.e. play)." ~ Susan J. Oliver
“Children don’t need much advice but they really do need to be listened to and not just with half an ear.” ~ Emma Thompson
“Either we spend time meeting children’s emotional needs by filling their cup with love, or we spend time dealing with behaviors caused from their unmet needs. Either way, we spend the time.” ~ Pam Leo, Connecting Through Filling The Love Cup
“If a child is poor in math but good at tennis, most people would hire a math tutor. I would rather hire a tennis coach.” ~ Deepak Chopra
“The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them – the things they need to know – and forget the rest.” ~ Daniel Quinn
“Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” ~ Robert Fulghum
“To be in your children’s memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today.” ~ Anonymous
“One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive - very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence, and people who would be at their best outside of that structure get lost.” ~ Bruce Springsteen [Singer-songwriter]
“Your children are not a masterpiece that you create. They are their own masterpiece, creating themselves, and you have been given the privilege of watching them be the artist.” ~ J. Warren Welch
"Most people have to live their lives as individuals - and human beings should be individuals - yet we insist on inflicting on our children an education suitable only for members of a herd." ~ Joy Baker [Children in Chancery, 1964]
“You can’t teach children to behave better by making them feel worse. When children feel better, they behave better.” ~ Pam Leo [Connection Parenting]
"Childhood is just as important a part of life as adulthood. It’s not a waiting room to someday start life from. It is life. It may even be the best part of life. Let’s not stifle it, dismiss it, or undermine it. Let children live to the fullest their childhood days. They can never get them back." ~ L.E. Mastilock
"The modern factory-schooling education system is one of the greatest crimes against humanity. One hundred years from now, we will look back at the violence of schooling and ask how we could we have done this to innocent children." ~ Manish Jain, Shikshantar Andolan
"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them." ~ Walt Disney
"Children don’t drop out of high school when they are 16, they do so in the first grade and wait 10 years to make it official." ~ Bob Keeshan
"Every word, movement and action has an effect. No other person or outside force has a greater influence on a child than the parent." ~ Bob Keeshan
"Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders." ~ Tom Peters
“The parent knows that the child cannot be artificially motivated to learn; they know that he is already motivated by the strongest driving force on earth: his inner intent.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce
“We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce
“A ‘school-at-home’ approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce
"The people that I back in venture (capital) are the kids that back in school would say, ‘Wait a minute, this is pointless. I don’t want to do this.’ And, often times, by the time you get to high school with kids that’s gone. I think that’s one of the big costs of the way we organize school. Kids are discouraged and marked down for saying ‘Wait a minute, why should I do this? When am I ever going to use this? Why are you making me do something I can do online?’ I think way too often that’s a ‘C student’ or an ‘F student’ or a student we should medicate or a student we should ‘put in the penalty box’ for bad behavior and we feel like we have to bring them around. But, that is actually the mindset you need to change the world." ~ Ted Dintersmith
“Working hard for something that we don’t care about is called stress; Working hard for something we love is called passion.” – Simon Sinek
"The concept of universal compulsory schooling is a very recent idea, one that is not even two hundred years old, yet we act as if it is an ancient, surefire way to make sure our children ‘learn something.’" ~ Patrick Farenga
"Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.” ~ David McCullough Jr.
“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.” ~ Vincent van Gogh
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” ~ Herbert Spencer
“Unstructured, open-ended play is where the magic of childhood happens.” ~ Alana Pace
"Instead of allowing children to develop in the way that nature intended them to, largely through free play, we expect them to live in adult-like schedules and learn in adult-like ways. For the immature human brain, we are asking far too much. We need to say no to over-scheduling and yes to letting kids be kids." ~ Alana Pace
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Education is what you learn after you leave school." ~ Robert Kiyosaki
"The idea of going to school and getting a job is the most destructive one in your brain." ~ Robert Kiyosaki
"In the real world, the smartest people are people who make mistakes and learn. In school, the smartest people don’t make mistakes.” ~ Robert Kiyosaki
"There are no mistakes in life, just learning opportunities." ~ Robert Kiyosaki
"Remember, your mind is your greatest asset, so be careful what you put into it." ~ Robert Kiyosaki
"If you’re still doing what mommy and daddy said for you to do (go to school, get a job, and save money), you’re losing." ~ Robert Kiyosaki
"The trouble with school is they give you the answer, then they give you the exam. That’s not life." ~ Robert Kiyosaki
“In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.” ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki, [Rich Dad, Poor Dad]
"Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them." ~ Ludwig von Mises
"Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought." ~ Ludwig von Mises
"In order to succeed in business a man does not need a degree from a school of business administration. These schools train the subalterns for routine jobs. They certainly do not train entrepreneurs." ~ Ludwig von Mises
"Society cannot contribute anything to the breeding and growing of ingenious men. A creative genius cannot be trained. There are no schools for creativeness. A genius is precisely a man who defies all schools and rules, who deviates from the traditional roads of routine and opens up new paths through land inaccessible before. A genius is always a teacher, never a pupil; he is always self-made." ~ Ludwig von Mises
"Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace." ~ Ludwig von Mises
“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ~ Haruki Murakami, [Norwegian Wood]
"The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence." ~ Denis Waitley
“Our job is obvious: we need to get out of the way, shine a light, and empower a new generation to teach itself and to go further and faster than any generation ever has.” ~ Seth Godin
"The essential thing measured by school is whether or not you are good at school. Being good at school is a fine skill if you intend to do school forever. For the rest of us, being good at school is a little like being good at Frisbee. It’s nice, but it’s not relevant unless your career involves homework assignments, looking through textbooks for answers that are already known to your supervisors, complying with instructions and then, in high-pressure settings, regurgitating those facts with limited processing on your part." ~ Seth Godin (Stop Stealing Dreams)