Thoughts and Quotes
On various topics that impact homeschooling...
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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.
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--Agatha Christie
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We're not trying to do "School at Home." We're trying to do homeschool. These are two entirely different propositions. We're not trying to replicate the time, style or content of the classroom. Rather we're trying to cultivate a lifestyle of learning in which learning takes place from morning until bedtime 7 days each week. The "formal" portion of each teaching day is just the tip of the iceburg.
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--Steve and Jane Lambert ( Five In A Row )
"Architect Frank Lloyd Wright told how a lecture he received at the age of nine helped set his philosophy of life: An uncle, a stolid no-nonsense type, had taken him for a long walk across a snow-covered field. At the far side, his uncle told him to look back at their two sets of tracks.
"See, my boy," he said, "how your foot prints go aimlessly back and forth from those trees, to the cattle back to the fence and then over there where you where throwing sticks? But notice how MY path comes straight across, directly to my goal. You should never forget this lesson!"
"And I never did," Wright said, grinning. "I determined right then not to miss most things in life, as my uncle had."
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School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
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--Ivan Illich in "Deschooling Society" 1970
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I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but I would prefer that to their being educated by the state.
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-- Max Victor Belz ( The Separation of School & State Alliance )
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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.
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-- Wendy Priesnitz
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Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.
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-- Melinda Harmon, Federal Judge, 1996
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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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-- William Butler Yeats
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What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
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-- George Bernard Shaw
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I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less slowly. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table while a sweet-voiced teacher suggest that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw trees in flower pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.
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-- Anne Sullivan
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Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds.
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-- Albert Einstein
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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.
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-- Education Reformer John Holt
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I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
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-- Albert Einstein
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Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling
environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school
environment, the teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn."
-- Gene Royer
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It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of
instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for
this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of
freedom.
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-- Albert Einstein
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Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
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-- Roger Lewin
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I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in
which they can learn."
-- Albert Einstein
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A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
-- Isabel Patterson, The God of the Machine
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When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think."
--Bertrand Russell
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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."
--John Holt
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The idea is to educate, not follow anyone's schedule about when something should be studied.
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--Ray Drouillard
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The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.
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--Ayn Rand
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