This page houses quotable quotes related to unschooling, natural learning and life in general.
"Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness."
--John Taylor Gatto - The Underground History of American Education
"Your life is an occassion - rise to it."
--Mr. Magorium
"Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do - and all we need to do - is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest."
--John Holt
“There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an influential idea, and there is a time to fear it’s hold over us. The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted it feels to us like plain common sense. At the point where objections are not answered any more because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have an idea, the idea has us.”
"It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. "
--Robert Louis Stevenson on boys having to sit through school
"Homeschool? I could never do that."
--A friend who is so involved with her kids that she puts most of my efforts to shame (to her, homeschool means bringing all that icky school stuff home).
"Our society is generally overstimulating and competetive, distracting children from their own inner guidance."
--Naomi Aldort
"While your societies continue to try to dictate and enforce human behavior to please the majority - because of your diversity, it continues to be an uncomfortable struggle that, again and again, falls of its economic weight. There simply is not enough money in the world to buck the natural currents of individual freedom and independence of thought."
--Abraham-Hicks
"This notion that schools are not capable of being effectively reformed is not a message most people can bear to hear. It requires great creativity and a revolutionary spirit to be willing to propose a replacement for an existing institution. Better means are already out there, so the process is merely one of revealing the problems of the existing model to the public and getting everyone to think more about the welfare of kids rather than blindly assuming something is good simply because it has a noble mission."
--Cevin Soling (In an interview with Education World about his documentary "The War on Kids")
