Browsing Topic 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 was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

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 coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

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.

If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself

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

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Calvin: Today for show and tell, I’ve brought a tiny miracle of nature: a single snowflake! I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water just like every other one when you bring it into the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I will be leaving you drips and going outside.

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

Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

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

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.

If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

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.

Life can only be understood backwards but you have to live it forward. You can only do that by stepping into uncertainty and by trying, within this uncertainty, to create your own islands of security….The new security will be a belief that …if this doesn’t work out you could do something else. You are your own security.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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.

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

In times of change, learners inherit the earth

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.