“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einstein

“One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called 'learned incompetency' and a fear of not being able to do things 'right' the first time.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“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

“If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.” ~ Linda Darling-Hammond

“There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.” ~ William Glasser

“School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.” ~ H.L. Mencken

“Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.” ~ Lillian Smith

“None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

“I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.” ~ Seymour Papert

“We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing.” ~ Peggy Pirro

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

“Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on.” ~ Robert Frost

“School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.” ~ Grace Llewellyn

“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.” ~ Frank Zappa

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

“Like jilted and disappointed lovers, some of my students just want to be left alone.” ~ Kirsten Olson

“Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.” ~ Tom Hodgkinson

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~ Pablo Picasso

"For better or worse, we learn every day, wherever we are, whatever we're doing, whoever we're with. We learn good things, useful things, handy things - and we learn bad things, destructive things, things we might someday wish we hadn't learned. Life's like that. On the whole, though, learning serves us quite well, and we're constantly arranging and rearranging our learning so it's more useful to us."  ~ Helen Hegener

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

“I recognize June by the flowers, now. I used to know it by review tests, and restlessness.” ~ Lisa Asher, unschooled teen

"It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life." ~ John Holt

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” ~ Rachel Carson

“How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“Perhaps the most basic assumption our society makes about education is that learning can and should be produced in people. This assumption leads to another one: Learning is the result of treatment by an institution called school.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

"Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen." ~ Ivan Illich

“Your life, time, and brain should belong to you, not to an institution.” ~ Grace Llewellyn

"It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching." ~ John Taylor Gatto

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

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

“Public education reflects our society's paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth's resources for granted.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.” ~ Ivan Illich

“Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?” ~ T. S. Eliot

“The best function of the school in my head, as it turns out, is to remind me where not to dwell. I did my time in and around school, and learned things painstakingly and grudgingly that my children later learned while laughing and playing and singing.”  ~ Sandra Dodd

“We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

“When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” ~ Paul Simon

“Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.” ~ John Dewey

“Because schools suffocate children’s hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” ~ Bertrand Russell

“School is not for learning.” ~ Grace Llewellyn

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

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.” ~ Carl Rogers

“Birds don’t go to flight school.” ~ Linda Dobson

“If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.” ~ Coleman Hawkins

“As a society, we must own up to the damage we do to our children...in our families and in our schools. We must also be willing to make the sweeping changes in our institutions, public policies and personal lives that are necessary to reverse that harm to our children and to our society.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

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

“Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.” ~ Albert Einstein

“College isn't the place to go for ideas.” ~ Helen Keller

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” ~ Albert Einstein

“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“Children do not need us to shape them; they need us to respond to who they are.” ~ Naomi Aldort

“The parent knows that the child cannot be artificially motivated to learn; they know that he is already motivated by the strongest driving force on earth: his inner intent.” ~ Joseph Chilton Pearce

"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

"Children don’t need to be taught how to learn; they are born learners. They come out of the womb interacting with and exploring their surroundings. Babies are active learners, their burning curiosity motivating them to learn how the world works. And if they are given a safe, supportive environment, they will continue to learn hungrily and naturally – in the manner and at the speed that suits them best." ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“Think of reading like riding a bicycle: One doesn’t consciously name the muscles involved or the particular actions required of each, or the parts of the bicycle, or Newton’s laws of motion, or the physics of gears, or the changes in brain chemistry associated with balance. One gets up on the seat and starts to pedal.” David Albert

“I was fortunate enough to extricate myself before insensibility set in.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore, on quitting school at 13

“Schooling was influenced by the idea that self-directed learning created ‘dangerous,’ free-thinking, intelligent people who would make sure the government never became more powerful than the people.” Laurie A. Couture

“What is the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has limits.” ~ Albert Einstein

“My grandmother wanted me to get a good education, so she kept me as far away from schools as possible.” ~ Margaret Mead

“Some of us are just less damaged than others.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

“Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'” ~ Marilyn Ferguson

“My ideal educational system would be a society in which knowledge was widely free and widely and freely shared, and children were everywhere trusted, respected, safe, valued, and welcomed.” ~ John Holt

“The most potent force for change... is the growing recognition of millions of adults that their own impoverished expectations and frustrations came, in large measure, from their schooling.” ~ Marilyn Ferguson

“Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”  ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“The force-feeding process of schooling is so relentless that many students gag on it. They tune out or leave school, and in some cases, become permanently soured on learning.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.” ~ R.D. Laing

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

“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

“Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy to children.” ~ John Holt

“Life-long learners start their education at home.” Beverley Paine

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.”  ~ Albert Einstein

“Some people can't leave school because they're carrying it around like a snail and his shell. They live there, still. School became an ingrown, hard part of them. They still define themselves by their school failures and successes.” ~ Sandra Dodd

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

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

“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.” ~ John Updike

“The idea that people should study for about 12 years and then start living is more deeply seated in our culture than many people realize.” ~ Larry and Susan Kaseman

“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

"I wonder why so many parents still want to keep their children hidden away in schools, when they could be learning in the wonderful, bright, ever-changing, always-stimulating real world." ~ Wendy Priesnitz

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

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

“When you see a car hurtling toward your child, you push him out of the way before you engage in conversation about Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. We must stop harming the children presently in our care. Right now. Today.” ~ Susan Ohanian

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

“Artificial learning takes what is simple and natural and turns it into a complex array of objectives, goals, measurements, administrators, supervisors, counselors, and transportation experts. Natural education requires only a guide providing direction, and a learner ready to discover and create goals and values that are personally meaningful.” ~ Linda Dobson

"[People] should be able to meet around a problem chosen and defined by their own initiative. Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems.... The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern" ~ Ivan Illich

“I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” ~ Eartha Kitt

“One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.” ~ John Taylor Gatto

“The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live. ~ Mortimer Adler

“My job is not to teach at all, but to find the opportunities for my kids to learn. NOT knowing something can be an advantage, as it reminds me of the wealth of resources out there in the community and world, if only we are willing to go look for them.” ~ David Albert

“Children are not our own art products to be turned out well, but their own life work in continual process.” ~ Jan Fortune Wood

“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Education: free and compulsory – what a way to learn logic!” ~ Frank van Dun

“My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.” ~ Natalie Goldberg

‎"It is absurd and anti-life to be a 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."  ~John Taylor Gatto

"Our schooling has led us to misunderstand the difference between the power to do something and the force that makes us do something. We were told one too many times to sit in our seats and listen, to put up our hands when we had to go to the bathroom, and to buy what we were offered." ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“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

“Forced association is not socialization.” ~ Adele Carroll

“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

“Unschooling and natural learning unfold from the centre - our centres. Our kids’ centres. Our families’ centres. The question we need to ask each day is what is central to our needs, as individuals within a family, within a community, within a society, within the family of humanity.” ~ Beverley Paine

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler

“Raising children with an emphasis on intrinsic rewards is not a technique, a method or a trick to get them to do what the parent wants them to by subtler means, but a way of life, a way of living with children with real respect for their intelligence and for their being.” ~ Mary Van Doren

“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” ~ Eric Hoffer

“In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: forget about it. Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it. One day, you will glance up at your collection of Japanese literature, or trip over the solar oven you built, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself.” ~ Grace Llewellyn

“Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” ~ John Dewey

“To better understand how children explore the world, observe yourself.” ~ Naomi Aldort

“Skill to do comes of doing.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.” ~Simone Weil

“If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.” ~ John Holt

“Whenever I had second thoughts about the socialization my children may have been missing by homeschooling, I'd take them to a G-rated matinee movie. One look around the theater at the running, screaming, popcorn-throwing little socialites was enough to overcome my doubts.” ~ Mario Pagnoni

“I am always doing things I can't do, that's how I get to do them.” ~ Pablo Picasso

“If our earth is to survive, we need to take responsibility for what we do. Taking control of our own education is the first step.” ~ Heidi Priesnitz

“I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.” ~ L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

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

“Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” ~ Winston Churchill

“When I was young, I was put in a school for retarded kids for two years before they realized I actually had a hearing loss and they called me slow!” ~ Kathy Buckley

“Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization…I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.” ~ Seymour Papert

“Perhaps the most basic assumption our society makes about education is that learning can and should be produced in people. This assumption leads to another one: Learning is the result of treatment by an institution called school.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz

“I loved learning, it was school I hated. I used to cut school to go learn something.” ~ Eric Jensen

“Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society…But for me, education means making creators…You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.” ~ Jean Piaget

"Teacheria is contagious but washing hands and vitamin C don’t help. Both my parents had the disease. I believe it is easily transmitted by modeling. 'Let me tell you how it works,' my father used to say and I had to listen quietly for his full explanation. Although I have Teacheria, I do not teach my children; I am clear that my drive to teach has nothing to do with their needs or preferences. Why should I interrupt their magical tour of this planet with my chatter?" ~ Naomi Aldort

"People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional." ~ Warren Buffett

‎"There were no sex classes. No friendship classes. No classes on how to navigate a bureaucracy, build an organization, raise money, create a database, buy a house, love a child, spot a scam, talk someone out of suicide, or figure out what was important to me. Not knowing how to do these things is what messes people up in life, not whether they know algebra or can analyze literature." ~ William Upski Wimsatt

If your favorite quote about education, unschooling, school, homeschooling, or life learning doesn't appear here, please send it along.