#homeschooling

"The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best"

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

"It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing."

"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."

"Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us."

"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."

"To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new."

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

"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."

"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent."

"Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony Express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies."

"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."

"As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly."

"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."

"Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."

"The home is the chief school of human virtues."

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

"When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable."

"Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. They were not sent away from home each day to a place just for children but lived, learned, worked, and played in the real world, alongside adults and other children of all ages."

"This book is not about "homeschooling"at all. School is an artificial institution contrived by man. This book is about educating a child in the heart of the family given to that child by his Creator."