Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside. Most of the information received meant absolutely nothing to me. ..Education without either meaning or excitement is impossible. I longed for the outdoors, leaving only a small part of my conscious self to pay attention to schoolwork.
Ansel Adams


I loathed every day and regret every moment I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.
Woody Allen


The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.
Hannah Arendt


Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Isaac Asimov


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.


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 the thoughts of other men.
James Beattie


You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.
Clay P. Bedford


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


If [our schools] are still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.
William John Bennett


A sense of curiosity is nature's original school of education.
Smiley Blanton


It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Alec Bourne


The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
Jerome S. Bruner


Learning should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life's greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the mind of noble and learned men, not a conducted tour through a jail.
Taylor Caldwell


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


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


All centralized systems mean the rule of the few; and educational machinery is among the most centralized of all systems. If the modern American really wants to know what his fathers meant by democracy, he will never learn it in school. He must make the supreme and awful sacrifice. He must get out and think.
G.K. Chesterton


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 am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.
Winston Churchill


I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.
Winston Churchill


I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world, so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster.
Edward de Bono


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


The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is is that you would have benefitted more by going into banking.
Phillip K. Dick


It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Frederick Douglass


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


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


How is it that little children are so intelligent while men are so stupid? It must be education that does it.
Alexandre Dumas


It don't make much difference what you study, so long as you don't like it.
Finley Peter Dunne on compulsory schooling


It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.
Albert Einstein


I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be.
Albert Einstein


It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
Albert Einstein


If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.
Albert Einstein


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


The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson


We are shut up in school and college recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.  We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms.  We do not know an edible root in the woods.  We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of day by the sun.  It is well if we can swim and skate.  We are afraid of a horse or a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider.  Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson


To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Emerson


Do no go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Emerson


What did you ask at school today?
Richard Fenyman


The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
Paul Karl Feyerabend


School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
E.M. Forster


Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E. M. Forster


Education is helping the child realise his potentialities.
Eric Fromm


Two roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost


You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
Galileo


Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.
David P. Gardner


The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him towards a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor... And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.
Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences


I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
John W. Gardner


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


By bells and many other similar techniques [schools] teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
John Taylor Gatto


There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent
Ghandi


I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.
Edward Grieg


It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society's goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don't get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn.
Charles Handy


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


Children grow up believing that life is like school, with every question having an answer in the back of the book. Maturity consists in recognizing that life is a continuing series of multiple choice questions with the answers torn out of the back of the book.
Sydney Harris


Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.
John Holt


If there were no other reason to homeschool your kids, the socialization they get in school would be reason enough.
John Holt


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


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


Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.
John Holt


You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.
Marilyn Howshall


We have come to realise that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
Ivan Illich


As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.
Franz Kafka


We can get too easily bogged down in the academic part of homeschooling, a relatively minor part of the whole, which is to raise competent, caring, literate, happy people.
Diane Flynn Keith


Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.
Madeleine L'Engle


Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
John Lubbock


Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.
Charlotte Mason


The home is the first and most effective place to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self control, the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home.
David O. McKay


The school system...is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
Marshall McLuhan


My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
Margaret Mead


The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
H. L. Mencken


School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
H. L. Mencken


The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
H.L. Mencken


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 teaching for his scholastic difficulties.
Alice Duer Miller


Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian


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


The geniuses of the ages were generally brought up in home schools.
Raymond Moore


An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.
Thomas Moore


Nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia


But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious til he's been to a good school.
H.H. Munro


The way you help heal the world is you start with your own family.
Mother Teresa


The immediate case against compulsory school for adolescents is quite simply their barbarity: it is a triangle of hatred, humiliation and contempt.
Frank Musgrove


We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
John Naisbett


Childhood is not preparation for adulthood - it is a part of life.
A. Neill


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


I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it's just depressing to me. The poor little kids.
Dolly Parton


Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.
Boris Pasternak


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


I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of use in everyday life.
Petronius (a.d. 66)


The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.
Jean Piaget


Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.
Plato


Thank goodness my education was neglected.
Beatrix Potter


Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
Beatrix Potter


Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.
Ezra Pound


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


Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be "taught" if they are to learn. . . . Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I'm angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own.
Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review


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


Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society.
Bertrand Russell


Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell


We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell


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


All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
Sir Walter Scott


I hate, loathe and despise schools....School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.
Maurice Sendak


We learn not for school, but for life.
Seneca


My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
George Bernard Shaw


There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.
George Bernard Shaw


My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.
George Bernard Shaw


What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw


What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw


When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.
Paul Simon



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


You know, when we are kids we make things up, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some are still writing; the real question is why did the other people stop?
William Stafford


I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.
St. Augustine


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 taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less slowly. Let him come and go 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 suggest 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 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 experiences.
Anne Sullivan


School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school....my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in.
Rabindranath Tagore


How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
Henry D. Thoreau


What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
Henry D. Thoreau


Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
Mark Twain


In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain


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


Reward and punishment is the lowest form of education.
Chuang Tzu


I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.
Sigrid Undset, writer and Nobel Laureate


School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike


Education with inert ideas is not only useless, it is above all things harmful.
A. N. Whitehead


Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
Albert Edward Wiggam


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde


You can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.
Winnie the Pooh


Architect Frank Lloyd Wright told how a lecture he received at the age of nine helped set his philosophy of life: An uncle, a stolid no-nonsense type, had taken him for a long walk across a snow-covered field. At the far side, his uncle told him to look back at their two sets of tracks. "See, my boy," he said, "how your foot prints go aimlessly back and forth from those trees, to the cattle back to the fence and then over there where you where throwing sticks? But notice how MY path comes straight across, directly to my goal. You should never forget this lesson!" And I never did, "Wright said, grinning. "I determined right then not to miss most things in life, as my uncle had."
Frank Lloyd Wright


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



Q: How does a homeschooling family change a light bulb?

A: First, mom checks three books on electricity out of the library, then the kids make models of light bulbs, read a biography of Thomas Edison and do a skit based on his life. Then, everyone studies the history of lighting methods, wrapping up with dipping their own candles. Next, everyone takes a trip to the store where they compare types of light bulbs as well as prices and figure out how much change they'll get if they buy two bulbs for $1.99 and pay with a five dollar bill. On the way home, a discussion develops over the history of money and also Abraham Lincoln, as his picture is on the five dollar bill. Finally, after building a homemade ladder out of branches dragged from the woods, the light bulb is installed. And there is light.

~Author Unknown



Why Public Schooling Is "Better" Than Homeschooling:

Most parents were educated in the underfunded public school system, and so are not smart enough to homeschool their own children.

Homeschooled children may not learn important office career skills, like how to sit still for six hours straight.

Fluorescent lighting may have significant health benefits.

The fashion industry depends upon the peer pressure that only public schools can generate.




Q. What do you call it when a homeschooling mom talks to herself?

A. A parent-teacher conference!