Unschooling Quotes

“Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”
― John Holt , Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling

“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.”
― J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

“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

“For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.

What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself”
― A.S. Neill

“Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It's not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.”
― Peter O. Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

“The belief that young people are incapable of making reasonable decisions is a cornerstone of our system of compulsory, closely monitored education.”
― Peter O. Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

“I’m sure if Socrates were alive today, and had to sit through even a single meeting discussing how to use data to inform instruction, he’d kill himself all over again.”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested, it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.”
― Barbara Lamping

“It was my assumption that skilled teachers spent their days imparting important and meaningful knowledge to eager students. I also believed, as many of you do, that I didn’t remember or wasn’t good at the things we learned in high school because I didn’t pay close enough attention or didn’t work hard enough.”
― 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

“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

“Know what you’re working toward and eliminate debt, so that if you change your mind later it doesn’t kill you to know you have a hundred thousand dollar biology degree hanging in the kitchen of the tapas restaurant you just opened.”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“A teenager’s nature is not laziness, their preferred state is not ignorance, and it is not necessary for extrinsic motivation to be delivered by trained professionals in order to prevent them from bareknuckle boxing under a bridge in exchange for drugs and money.”
― 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

“If a law violates a person’s liberty, is it not our duty to disobey? Is it not your ethical responsibility to act? Did you not join this profession to help and serve kids?”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“And there you sit, atop the smoking mountain of rubble that was once your home, covered in gray dust, cradling the mangled corpse of your little girl in your arms, looking south to a Mexican people who, in solidarity with you, have stopped riding Uber.”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“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

“It’s good and just that you practice on teachers and school principals, because one day you are going to have to live in a world of lawmakers and tax collectors, and you should have some sense of how to use your freedom of speech to claim control over your life.”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“People should make use of resources that work for them, but as with any act of consumption, carefully considering the necessity and ramifications makes for more mindful, meaningful living.”
― Milva McDonald, Slow Homeschooling: Essays About Mindful Homeschooling

“You would think that after fifteen years of war on terror, waged by a country with nuclear submarines, all terror on earth would be destroyed. I’m shocked that nary a nightmare has made it out alive. Yet somehow, killing the shit out of people – thousands and thousands of people – doesn’t make the living not scared. What you do wind up with are millions of refugees and armies of genocidal fanatics.”
― 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

“School vision statements often read something like, “We believe all kids can learn” or “life-long learners” or something silly like that. What an absurd thing to put in writing! “We, at Grassy Hill Elementary, believe all Kindergarteners can get taller” or “We, the Prospect Junior High cafeteria staff, believe that all kids can and will eat food.”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“Our freedom of speech is not some cute, optional, anachronistic thing that you write about on a short answer quiz about school uniforms or some such silliness. Your freedom to assemble (e.g., Junto), to create and distribute content, and to express yourself (e.g., to ask a Klan member Why do you hate me when you don’t know me?), and to be able to do so without fear of violence or censorship (which are essentially the same thing), is absolutely fundamental to a free and just society.”
― Brian Huskie, A White Rose: A Soldier's Story of Love, War, and School

“Learning can only happen when a child is interested. If he's not interested, it's like throwing marshmallows at his head and calling it eating.”
― Katrina Gutleben

“We didn't want our children to waste their time in the same empty rituals of education that we did: passing tests only to forget the subject matter when the grades were given; spending years with passing grades in foreign-language instruction yet being unable to have even a rudimentary conversation in the language outside of the classroom; struggling to learn advanced math skills that were seldom used outside of class; doing lab experiments that were more rote exercises than scientific inquiries. Time and youth cannot be regained, so perhaps, ultimately, the real crisis in education may be one of disillusionment among graduates rather than poor performance among current students.”
― John Holt, Teach Your Own: The Indispensable Guide to Living and Learning with Children at Home

“While we can lament the years children may have needlessly suffered through the expectations and limitations of dominant society, today will always be the best day to change the context.”
― Antonio Buehler, Trust Kids

“What is needed is true child liberation, true autonomy, true trust and respect, because children deserve these things by right of being people. There doesn't have to be--there shouldn't be--any justification needed, any future use to be extracted from them, for children to be deserving of liberation.”
― Idzie Desmarais, Trust Kids

“While we can lament the years children may have needlessly suffered through the expectations and limitations of dominant society, today will always be the best day to change the context.”
― Antonio Buehler