Best Unschooling Quotes

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

I always like to learn, but I don’t always like to be taught.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

Unschooling is creating an environment in which children can learn easily and naturally all the time.

For those orderly folks who have life all neatly arranged in their heads, who do more accepting than questioning, unschooling is a disturbing thing.

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.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can’t be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

When you get down to it, unschooling is really just a fancy term for ‘life’ or ‘growing up uninstitutionalized’.

School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.

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

School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

Education: free and compulsory – what a way to learn logic!

Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.

Public school – where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on 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.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.

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.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

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.

As far as I have seen, at school…they aimed at blotting out one’s individuality.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

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.

Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

There are only two places in the world: over here and over there.

I loved learning, it was school I hated. I used to cut school to go learn something.

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. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.