Home School and Education Quotes

I'm just getting started on this page. There are so many Home School and Education Quotes out there, education quotes are easy to find homeschool quotes are a little harder...I'm trying to find the ones that have to do with Home School...many of these are duplicates from the Education Quotes Page or belong on the education quotes page...

Here's a mess of John Holt quotes on education and homeschooling:

" Teaching does not make learning --- organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to 100% false. Learners make learning. " ~John Holt

"We can think of ourselves not as teachers but as gardeners. A gardener does not 'grow' flowers; he tries to give them what he thinks they need and they grow by themselves." ~John Holt

"Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." ~John Holt

"What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all" ~John Holt

"The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners." ~John Holt

"To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted." John Holt

"We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way." ~John Holt

"The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do." ~John Holt

"The child is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense..." ~John Holt

"I have used the words "home schooling" to describe the process by which children grow and learn in the world without going, or going very much, to schools, because those words are familiar and quickly understood. But in one very important sense they are misleading. What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth in the word is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn't a school at all." John Holt, Teach Your Own

"The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental." ~John Holt

"The child does not merely observe the world around him. He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it." ~John Holt

"It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society." ~John Holt

"What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out." ~John Holt, Teach Your Own

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty rewards – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else." ~John Holt

"All I am saying... can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted." ~John Holt

"Children may be more capable of competent self-directed learningthan we give them credit for..." ~John Holt

"It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society." ~John Holt

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" Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school environment, the teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn." ~Gene Royer

"The idea of learning acceptable social skills in a school is as absurd to me as learning nutrition from a grocery store."~ Lisa Russell

"Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve." ~Roger Lewin

"Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new." ~ Wendy Priesnitz

"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

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." ~Ivan Illich in "Deschooling Society" 1970

"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but I would prefer that to their being educated by the state.' ~Max Victor Belz ( The Separation of School & State Alliance )

"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." ~Albert Einstein

"When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think." ~Bertrand Russell

"The idea is to educate, not follow anyone's schedule about when something should be studied." ~Ray Drouillard

"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state." ~Isabel Patterson, The God of the Machine

"To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. " ~Wendy Priesnitz

"Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school." ~Melinda Harmon, Federal Judge, 1996

"Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves." ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928

" We're not trying to do "School at Home." We're trying to do homeschool. These are two entirely different propositions. We're not trying to replicate the time, style or content of the classroom. Rather we're trying to cultivate a lifestyle of learning in which learning takes place from morning until bedtime 7 days each week. The "formal" portion of each teaching day is just the tip of the iceberg. " ~Steve and Jane Lambert

More Education Quotes

"Education has for its object the formation of character." - Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903)

"Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices." - Laurence Peter

"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." ~G. M. Trevelyan

"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

"Education is an admirable thing, but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." - Oscar Wilde

"Education is hanging around until you've caught on." - Jonathan Kozol

"Education is helping the child realise his potentialities." -Eric Fromm

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - William Butler Yeats

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." - Robert Frost

"Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know." - G K Chesterton

"Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." - Henry Peter Broughan

"Education means to lead out. We seem to understand this as leading away from childhood, but maybe we could think of it as eliciting the wisdom and talents of childhood itself. As A.S.Neill, founder of the Summerhill School, taught many years ago, we can trust that the child already has talents and intelligence. We believe that the child intellectually is a tabula rasa, a blank blackboard, but maybe the child knows more than we suspect." - Thomas Moore

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." - Malcolm Forbes

"Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equaliser of the conditions of man, - the balance-wheel of the social machinery." - Horace Mann

Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. - Trevelyan

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men." ~Bill Beattie

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." ~Robert Frost

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school." ~Albert Einstein

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." -B. F. Skinner

"The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." ~Sydney J. Harris

"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life." ~Author Unknown

"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army." ~Edward Everett

"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding." ~Ezra Pound

"To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion." ~Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

"The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives." ~Robert Maynard Hutchins

"My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects." ~Robert Maynard Hutchins

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." ~Will Durant

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." ~George Santayana

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." ~Malcolm S. Forbes

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." ~Aristotle

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." ~Mark Twain

"When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course." ~Peter Drucker

"Education is the movement from darkness to light." ~Allan Bloom

"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." ~John W. Gardner

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." ~John Dewey

"There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in." ~Will Rogers

"The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." ~Lewis Carroll

"The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort." ~Ayn Rand


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