Like most people, I love to read inspiring quotes and nuggets of advice. When we made the decision to homeschool, one of the first things I did was check out all the books from the library and look for quotes. There are so many homeschool veterans who have paved the way for those of us starting now. Hearing their stories, challenges, experiences, and wisdom is encouraging and reaffirms why we are choosing to head off the beaten bath.
I wanted to compile a huge list, not only for all of you, but for myself. Words have power and I know I am going to need to read these back to myself many times in the years ahead. I hope that you find just as much comfort in them. Thank you to every single of those mentioned below in the quotes. You are pioneers.
1. “Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be “taught” if they are to learn… Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I’m angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own.” -Adam Robinson
2. “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” – John Dewey
3. “I think the socializing aspects of school are ten times as likely to be harmful as helpful. The human virtues—kindness, patience, generosity, etc., are learned by children in intimate relationships, maybe groups of two or three. By and large, human beings tend to behave worse in large groups, like you find in school. There they learn something quite different—popularity, conformity, bullying, teasing, things like that. They can make friends after school hours, during vacations, at the library, in church.” -John Holt
4. “To make the most of this homeschooling life, we need to create the conditions for our children to thrive. Indoor and outdoor environments rich with imaginative play, natural objects, interesting people, good books, art supplies, and organic experiences, to name a few. And above all, a parent committed to letting them explore, learn and grow at their own pace.” -Ainsley Arment
5. “I would always have to fight for social acceptance at school – and I would do just about anything to get it. When I was homeschooled my insecurities were overcome by parental love.” -Joshua Hesford
6. “The most important work you will ever do will be within the walls of your own home.” -Harold B. Lee
7. “Homeschoolers happily speak with more ease and poise because they don’t fear adults as authority figures. Their authority figures were always their loving parents, teachers and often their best friends; if your best friend is your teacher and authority figure, education is less stressful. –Rebbecca Devitt
8. “Kids who are in school just visit life sometimes, and then they have to stop to do homework or go to sleep early or get to school on time. They are constantly reminded they are “preparing for real life,” while being isolated from it.” -Sandra Dodd
9. “The key to a successful education is not remembering the sequence of battles in World War I or getting an A on the geometry test. A robust education is the ability to make meaningful use of any and all information.” -Julie Bogart
10. “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” -Mister Fred Rogers
11. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” -Albert Einstein
12. “… don’t compare your season of planting seeds with another mom’s season of harvesting them.” -Jamie C. Martin
13. “Anything you teach in an indoor classroom can be taught outdoors, often in ways that are more enjoyable for children.” -Cathy James
14. “I cut our school time to the most important and let the kids have the rest of the time to play — which it turns out is pretty important for their learning anyway.” -Pam Barnhill
15. “If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.” -Ignacio Estrada
16. “There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.” -Gandhi
17. “We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.” -John Holt
18. “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
19. “Homeschooling allows you the freedom to step off the highway of learning and take a more scenic route along a dirt road.” -Tamara L. Chilver
20. “You hear the word “socialization” used frequently, that is what schools do best – they socialize children. No, they don’t. You learn to talk to a fragment of people your own age, you learn to envy, resent, and fear people older than you, and you learn to have contempt for people younger than you. They hardly exist.” -John Taylor Gatto
21. “Let children have tales of the imagination, scenes laid in other lands and other times; heroic adventures, hairbreadth escapes, delicious fairy tales, even where it is all impossible, and they know it, and yet they believe.” -Charlotte Mason
22. “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” -Sir Ken Robinson
23. “One of the main reasons we homeschool is to foster relationships with our children, so when we prioritize the relationship over the to-do list, we are succeeding.” -Ainsley Arment
24. “Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.” -John Taylor Gatto
25. “Connect to your children. The academics matter, but they follow. Your children’s happiness and safe, supportive relationship with you come first. Believe it or not, your children are happiest when they believe you are delighted by them.” -Julie Bogart
26. “How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” -Henry D. Thoreau.
27. “By letting our children lead us to their own special places we can rediscover the joy and wonder of nature.” -Richard Louv
28. “The more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think the same is true of human beings.” -Henry David Thoreau
29. “Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.” -Sir Ken Robinson
30. “Don’t worry about socialization. Wherever people congregate, there is going to be interaction, socialization. Where is it written that it needs to be in schools?” -Mary Kay Clark
31. “To have a more effective home education, I realized I needed to abandon the trappings of school and harness the energy of home.” -Julie Bogart
32. “The gardener does not make the plant grow. The job of a gardener is to create the optimal conditions.” -Sir Ken Robinson
33. “Our children need our time, not our intelligence. They bloom with love, not perfect language skills. They need mercy, not intellectual mastery. And they will learn—indeed, truly learn—when they are given time to explore ideas without constant fact-checking and examination.” -Ainsley Arment
34. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school: it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” -Beatrix Potter
35. “All the world is my school.” -George Whitman
36. “A happy house for homeschool is one where every inch is used for learning, messes are welcomed, people are more precious than furnishings, and household maintenance is a varying standard with fluctuating amounts of help, and we’re all okay with it most of the time.” -Julie Bogart
37. “The first real lesson I learned as a homeschool teacher is that … it’s the students that lead the way.” -Patti Armstrong
38. “Part of the school dilemma results from an over-focus on testing results; home educators are free from that pressure, so you won’t have to decide between test prep and expository writing.” -Susan Wise Bauer
39. “An observant child should be put in the way of things worth observing.” -Charlotte Mason
40. “The idea that children need to be around many other youngsters in order to be ‘socialized’ is perhaps the most dangerous and extravagant myth in education and child rearing today.” -Dr. Raymond Moore
41. “You are your child’s best teacher because you can lead by example. You can show them how to pursue knowledge by doing so yourself. You can join them on this learning journey as a guide through life and education, and sometimes the other way around.” -Ainsley Arment
42. “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” -Albert Einstein
43. “Children deserve to grow and learn in a place & alongside a force that is as wild and alive as they are.” -Nicolette Sowder
44. “A lifestyle of learning begins at home – with parents who create a context that is welcoming of children as they are and that offers them happy experiences, accessible tools, and parental involvement.” -Julie Bogart
45. “The process of socialization is nowhere near complete at age five or six, when modern children start spending up to half their waking hours taking their cues from other people’s children. Because they accompany their parents’ daily routine, homeschooled kids spend plenty of time interacting with people of all ages, which I think most people would agree is a far more natural, organic way to socialize.” -Quinn Cummings
46. “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.” -W.B. Yeats
47. “The secret to successful homeschooling is faithfulness – consistency if you rather.” -Pam Barnhill
48. “What do parents owe their young that is more important than a warm and trusting connection to the Earth?” -Theodore Roszak
49. “Raising children is hard, full of twists and turns, missteps and mistakes, regrets and trying new things. But even on its most challenging day, homeschooling is really just an extension of parenting. Rest assured, there is no perfect school, classroom, teacher, mother, or homeschool. But we can do the best we can, one day at a time. And that’s good enough.” -Ainsley Arment
50. “No one has to do anything in order to ‘socialize’ the children, or make them take part in the life of the group. They are born social; it is their nature.” -John Holt
51. “Enchanted education and living are all about small surprises of happy—scattered, littered, peppered throughout garden-variety days.” -Julie Bogart
52. “Every student can learn, just not on the same day or in the same way.” -George Evans
53. “I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused – a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love – then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.” -Rachel Carson
54. “Children are born ready to learn. During the preschool years a child’s brain is twice as active as an adults, with trillions of connections between brain cells being made. And it is the child’s relationships and experiences during the early years that greatly influence how the brain develops.” -Diane Gordon
55. “We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love of this Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole. In my children’s memories, the adventures we’ve had together in nature always exist.” -Richard Louv
56. “We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.” -Sir Ken Robinson
57. “My kids were much better at getting along with people of all ages when they were homeschooled and were able to be cheerful and outgoing in public and get along with their peers and friends. They learnt to interact with the world in a much more real way than being expected only to know how to communicate with other kids their age.” -Jenny Allen
58. For a child there is no division between playing and learning; between the things he or she does ‘just for fun’ and things that are ‘educational.’ The child learns while living and any part of living that is enjoyable is also play. -Penelope Leach
59. “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
60. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” -Ben Franklin
61. “When we focus on instilling a love of learning over a list of requirements, we can almost guarantee that our children’s education won’t end when they leave our homes.” -Ainsley Arment
62. “Childhood is not a race to see how quickly a child can read, write, and count. Childhood is a small window of time to learn and develop at the pace which is right for each individual child.” -Magda Gerber
63. “Home is the only place in which our children have a fighting chance of falling in love with books.” -Sarah Mackenzie
64. “The teacher might be talking about history or math, but what the students in a traditional classroom are learning is how to be students in a classroom. And they are learning it very well. They are learning how to take notes. They are learning how to surreptitiously communicate with peers. They are learning how to ask questions to endear themselves to authority figures.” -Clark Aldrich
65. “The child should live in an environment of beauty.” -Maria Montessori
66. “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.” -Clay P. Bedford
67. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” -Plutarch
68. “When I began this homeschooling-parenting gig, I wanted to create a warm memorable life for my kids and myself, not just an education. We’re not only preparing our children to get a job someday in the future. The education of my kids had to make the present moment memorable and good.” -Julie Bogart
69. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and
understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” -Albert Einstein
70. “When children are surrounded by curious and creative adults, they have their own inner genius sparked into action.” -Thomas Armstrong
71. “When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable.” -Elizabeth Foss
72. “We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.” -Freeman Dyson
73. “I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.” -Saint Augustine
74. “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.” -Rachel Carson
75. “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” -Aristotle
76. “It’s such a joy to be home with my children, to have the opportunity to really know them and what they are learning, and to help facilitate their learning in ways that work best for each of them.” -Wendy Woerner
77. “Homeschooled children benefit the community because they are not shaped by peers but by parents.” -Mary Kay Clark
78. “Children still need a childhood with dirt, mud, puddles, trees, sticks, and tadpoles.” -Brooke Hampton
79. “Meaningful learning happens when our children wrestle directly with great ideas – not as a result of our repackaging those great ideas, but when they interact with the ideas themselves.” -Sarah Mackenzie
80. “You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.” -Marilyn Howshall
81. “When you homeschool your children, you have to make sacrifices: of your time, of your energy, of your money. Speaking of money, you know, when I look back, living on one income all those years meant we didn’t drive expensive cars or go on extended high-end vacations. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that we had time together…nothing can replace that. You can have that time too. Concentrate on the positives, and enjoy your time with your kids. You won’t be sorry.” -Barbara Frank
82. “We agree that we want our children to be properly socialized; that’s why we homeschool. Homeschooling enables the kids to socialize properly. They grow up with people all day long and grow up with people in their homes, with people down the street and in the supermarkets. That’s why they’re well socialized.” -William and Susan McAulay
83. “Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.” -Winston Churchill
84. “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
85. “Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing can happen to a great mind.” -Sir Ken Robinson
86. “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” -Jim Rohn
87. “I loathed every day and regret every moment I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.” -Woody Allen
88. “The difference between school and life? In school you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” -Prabeena Kalyan
89. “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.” -Rachel Gathercole
90. “From the day you became a parent, you also became a teacher, and you are equipped to be a teacher.” -Anne Campbell
91. “I think it’s necessary to let kids get bored once in a while—that’s how they learn to be creative.” -Kim Raver
92. “We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.” -B. F Skinner
93. “You don’t need a schoolteacher to get knowledge – you can get it from looking at the world, from watching films, from conversations, from reading, from asking questions, from experience.” -Grace Llewellyn
94. “I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.” -C.S Lewis
95. “Our aim is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core.” -Maria Montessori
96. “Children are, by nature and from birth, very curious about the world around them, and very energetic, resourceful and competent in exploring it, finding out about it, and master it. In short, much more eager to learn, and much better at learning than most adults.” -John Holt
97. “Educating yourself does not mean that you were stupid in the first place; it means that you are intelligent enough to know that there is plenty left to learn.” -Melanie Joy
98. “Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking – the strain would be too great – but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest.” -Charlotte Mason
99. “Homeschooling is about helping make it possible for children to reach maturity with healthy, curious, fully conscious minds.” -Earl Gary Stevens
100. “Instead of raising children who turn out okay despite their childhood, let’s raise children who turn out extraordinary because of their childhood.” –L.R. Knost
101. “A book can’t change the world on its own. But a book can change readers. And readers? They can change the world.” -Sarah Mackenzie
102. “It shouldn’t matter how slowly a child learns as long as we are encouraging them not to stop.” -Robert John Meehan
103. “We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.” -John Holt
104. “Today when you nurture, love and meet the needs of your beloveds with beauty, it will make a difference in how they face their whole day.” -Sally Clarkson
105. “The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.” -Charlotte Mason
106. “When children go from one class to the next, followed by extracurricular activities, sports, and then homework all evening, when do they get to experience the wonder of childhood?” -Ainsley Arment
107. “Homeschooling is not about rejecting other people and things; it’s about making personal and positive choices for your own family.” –Mariette Ulrich
108. “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
109. “We can get too easily bogged down in the academic part of homeschooling, a relatively minor part of the whole, which is to raise competent, caring, literate, happy people.” -Diane Flynn Keith
110. “When my head hits the pillow each night, I want to know that I have done the one most important thing: I have fostered warm, happy memories and created lifelong bonds with my kids—even when the rest of life feels hard.” -Sarah Mackenzie
111. “If the purpose of learning is to score well on a test, we’ve lost sight of the real reason for learning.” -Jeannie Fulbright
112. “Homeschooling allows children to develop their own creativity and not be stifled by mass education.” -Fay Robertson
113. “There’s a growing movement of parents who are out to save childhood. Where our culture tells kids to achieve more, these mothers whisper: Slow down. Where schools push for performance through standardized testing, these parents whisper: Chase wonder. Where entertainment beckons kids to screens, the rivers and forests whisper: Come be wild and free.” -Ainsley Arment
114. “Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.” -Roger Lewin
115. “We were all meant to be naturalists, each in his degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.” -Charlotte Mason
116. “Don’t just tell your children about the world, show them” -Penny Whitehouse
117. “What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.” -John Taylor Gatto
118. “Education begins at home and I applaud the parents who recognize that they – not someone else – must take responsibility to assure that their children are well educated.” –Earnest Istook
119. “Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning.” -Mister Fred Rogers
120. “It takes courage to trust effortless learning. We usually require evidence of suffering to prove a child is getting an education.” -Julie Bogart
121. “When we embark on a hard adventure with our kids, we must make sure our kids know we believe in them. This not only helps them to believe in their own ability to conquer the challenge but also knits their hearts with ours as we rise to the challenge together.” -Greta Eskridge
122. “Learning is not a product of teaching. Kids are born learning. They learn how to walk, how to talk. They’re basically little scientists. If we don’t stop that process, it will continue.” -Grace Llewellyn
123. “And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children.” -Charlotte Mason
124. “Homeschooling moms are what remains of the leisured classes in these hurried, frantic days.” -Cindy Rollins
125. “Each child has a spark of genius waiting to be discovered, ignited, and fed. And the goal of schools shouldn’t be to manufacture “productive citizens” to fill some corporate cubicle; it should be to inspire each child to find a “calling” that will change the world. The jobs for the future are no longer Manager, Director, or Analyst, but Entrepreneur, Creator, and even Revolutionary.” -Clark Aldrich
126. “Forced association is not socialization.” -Adele Carroll
127. “Thankfully, when working with between one and five students, formal instruction and practice can be much richer, as well as more targeted. Thus 2 structured hours of instruction and practice can cover more content than a full industrial school day.” -Clark Aldrich
128. “Self-education through play and exploration requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time—time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures. That time is needed to make friends, play with ideas and materials, experience and overcome boredom, learn from one’s own mistakes, and develop passions.” -Peter Gray
129. “I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library is open, unending, free.” -Ta-Nehisi Coates
130. “Every child needs to see the possibilities of being human, watch the consequence of choices, and have their hearts stretched by goodness and courage in action.” -Gladys M. Hunt
130. “Show the children every winged thing. The bees, dragonflies, queen ants, bluebirds, luna moths, and swallowtails. Creatures that inspire them to defy gravity.” -Nicolette Sowder
131. “Keep your children wild – don’t make them grow up too fast. Let them spend their days in the sunshine using their imagination. They are the change! Those wild children daydreaming in the sunshine will grow into grounded adults with minds and spirits capable of creating a better future.” -Brooke Hampton
132. “Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives.” -Thomas Berry
133. “The system doesn’t create your homeschool. YOU do. Fundamentally, your homeschool thrives when you are fear-free, and you have faith in your own judgement.” -Julie Bogart
134. “We must teach our children to smell the earth, to taste the rain, to touch the wind, to see things grow, to hear the sun rise and night fall – to care.” -John Cleal
135. “It is time for a return to childhood, to simplicity, to running and climbing and laughing in the sunshine, to experiencing happiness instead of being trained for a lifetime of pursuing happiness. It is time to let children be children again.” -L.R. Knost
136. “If we provide enough space and possibilities for moving freely, then the children will move as well as animals: skillfully, simply, securely, naturally.” -Dr. Emmi Pikler
137. “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” -John Muir
138. “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.” -Sir Ken Robinson
139. “Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.” –Erin Kenny
140. “If we want our children to move mountains, we first have to let them get out of their chairs.” -Nicolette Sowder
141. “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life” -Charlotte Mason
142. “Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.” -Sir Ken Robinson
143. “Before we ever put a pencil in a child’s hands, those hands should dig, climb, press, pull, squish, twist, and pinch in a wide array of environments and with a variety of materials.” -Amanda Morgan
144. “The best education does not happen at a desk, but rather engaged in everyday living – hands on, exploring, in active relationship with life.” – Vince Gowmon
145. “Let us leave the life free to develop within the limits of the good, and let us observe this inner life developing. This is the whole of our mission.” -Maria Montessori
146. “Learning is creation, not consumption. Knowledge is not something a learner absorbs, but something a learner creates.” -George Couros
147. “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
148. “Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” -Leonardo da Vinci
149. “Our curriculum is the course that we travel.” -Sarah Mackenzie
150. “There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom.” -Joao Coutinho
151. “If you trust play, you will not have to control your child’s development as much. Play will raise the child in ways you can never imagine.” -Vince Gowmon
152. “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” -Ivan Illich
153. “Deny children – or anyone else – the chance to do ‘nothing’ and we may be denying them the chance to do ‘something’ – to find and do any work that is truly important, to themselves, or to someone else.” -John Holt
154. “The greatest learning that ever takes place in the human mind- a learning of such vastness, such reach, such complexity that it overshadows all other learning – takes place in the first three years of life without the child ever being aware of learning at all.” -Jospeh Chilton Pearce
155. “The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them – the things they need to know – and forget the rest.” -Daniel Quinn
157. “Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them.” -John Holt
158. “Children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves.” -Peter Gray
156. “I see the greatest enemy to a happy, nurturing, and healthy childhood to be a rushed childhood. Simple as that.” -Donna Simmons
159. “Learning is enhanced through open-ended play. Without even knowing it, kids are working on their math and science skills as they construct things. What may at first glance appear to be frivolous play is often engagement in a hyper-rich learning environment.” -Scott Sampson
160. “Wouldn’t life be easier for both parents and infants if parents would observe, relax and enjoy what their child is doing, rather than keep teaching what the child is not yet capable of?” -Magda Gerber
161. “What would you rather have? A child who begrudgingly recites data and can’t wait for school to be over or a child who falls in love with learning and doesn’t know exactly when school ends and life begins?” -Ainsley Arment
162. “If you only look at your child there is no behind, average, or ahead – just your child and all their own unique wonderfulness!” -Nicole Bailey
163. “If anything can be said of our homeschools, may it be that they are safe places for our children. Places where they can be encouraged in their gifts and comforted in their struggles. Places where they can share their fears and express their sorrows. Places where they can be heard and known and taken seriously.” -Ainsley Arment
164. “We overvalue struggle as evidence of learning, when it we really think about it – joy and pleasure are much better signs of growth and learning.” -Julie Bogart
165. “Wonder is the engine that drives curiosity and shares a robust intellect.” -Sally Clarkson
166. “Children are brilliant learners because they don’t think of themselves as learning; they think of themselves as doing.” -Peter Gray
167. “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
168. “Children are souls to be nourished, not products to be measured.” -Andrew Kern
169. “Learning lasts a lifetime – we don’t have to cram it all in by age eighteen.” -Julie Bogart
170. “Children who are provided the tools for learning, including access to a wide range of other people from whom to learn, learn what they need to know, and much more, through self-directed playing, exploring, and questioning.” -Peter Gray
171. “Break the mold. Let the world become your classroom. Fling open the windows. Swing wide the doors. Let your curiosities spill out into the streets, the fields and forests, where your children can pursue their passions and make the most of their one wild and precious life. Chuck the chalkboard. Ditch the desks. Throw the puzzles on the floor and play games together. Read great books not within four walls but upon a blanket spread across a meadow or a mountain, where their authors probably imagined their stories in the first place. Let them play, pretend, and imagine. Give them opportunities to build, create, and take things apart.” -Ainsley Arment
172. “Live your life, relish ideas, wrestle, remember, think, and converse. That is a curriculum you cannot buy. But your child’s heart and mind will feast on it for years to come.” -Sarah Mackenzie
173. “Education is not about drilling facts into students heads or teaching them to strain for the high grades, but cultivating a sense of wonder that drives them to discover, explore, and protect all that is good and beautiful.” -Sally Clarkson
174. “It isn’t all as hard as the experts make out. We are human beings, persons, created to live. To have life more abundantly, wonder together; grow together.” -Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
175. “The most effective form of learning educates the whole person, but it doesn’t have to happen overnight. It happens by sowing one tiny seed at a time, then watering, feeding, nurturing, and covering it all in prayer.” -Durenda Wilson
176. “Our own curiosity fuels our homeschools. Every subject in the universe has magic in it. It’s up to us to find it.” -Julie Bogart
177. “The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” -Plato
178. “If you do decide to pull your child out of the classroom, remember this: you’ve been parenting this child for his entire life. If you can parent, you can educate.” -Susan Wise Bauer
179. “Surrender the idea of what the ideal homeschool day is supposed to look like, and take on, with both hands, the day that is.” -Sarah Mackenzie
180. “What we are about is not some misty future preparation for our children. Education is not a life later; it is a life now.” -Maryellen St. Cyr
181. “Connection over correction. Play over programs. Rhythm over regulations. Stories over soapboxes. Curiosity over curriculum. Woods over worksheets.” -Ainsley Arment
182. “It is not your responsibility to make other people comfortable with the choices you make for your family.” -Leah McDermott
183. “Homeschooling is about doing life with your family, not doing lesson plans. Reset your thinking to seize every opportunity that will make an impact on your child’s life for eternity. The best lessons are found in real life.” -Tamara Chilver
184. “To be a good teacher, you must be a student of your children. What makes them tick? What makes them explode? Be a gentle gardener, helping bring their love of learning to life.” -Sally Clarkson
185. “Why just produce school at home? You have such an opportunity at home to live a completely different life.” -Julie Bogart
186. “Homeschooling is about relationships, about individualized education, about freeing our kids to learn what they want at their own pace because we can.” -Ainsley Arment
187. “The best education we can give our children is the one that says: there are unlimited ways to get where you want to go; I’m here to help you find your way.” -Julie Bogart
188. “Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child.” -Tom Stoppard
189. “Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.” -Charlotte Mason
190. “Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning place.” -John Hot
191. “No kid is unsmart. Every kid is a genius at something. Our job is to find it. And then to encourage it.” -Robin Sharma
192. “Don’t let the bustling culture determine the needs of your children. You get to choose how they grow up. You can protect their time, energy, and imagination. You are the gatekeepers of the garden of their childhood.” -Ainsley Arment
193. “Your homeschool is impacted by your parenting more than by your curriculum.” -Belinda Letchford
194. “Classical education in the fall. Unit studies in the winter. Unschooling in the spring.” -Julie Bogart
195. “Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not following directions.” -Alfie Kohn
196. ““If children are to grow into healthy, well-adjusted adults, nature needs to be integral to their everyday lives, from place-based learning at school to unstructured, unsupervised, even risk-prone play around home. Nature isn’t just a bunch of far-off plants, animals, and landscapes to learn about and visit once or twice a year. It’s an environment to be immersed in daily, especially during our childhood years.” -Scott Sampson
197. “The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.” -Sarah Mackenzie
198. “The world has so much more to offer than the small slice of subjects taught in traditional school.” -Nina Palmo
199. “Institutionalized school has taught us to seek answers in order to get the lesson over with rather than to inspire more questions and extend the curiosity of students.” -Leigh Bortins
200. “Being an effective mentor means becoming a coconspirator, a fellow explorer, a chaser of clues.” -Scott Sampson
201. “Give yourself permission to stop. There is healing and beauty in the pause.” -Michelle Maros
202. “Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing.” -Madeline Hunter
203. “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” -Charles Scribner Jr.
204. “All education is environmental education . . . By what is included or excluded, students are taught that they are part of, or apart from, the natural world.” -Scott Sampson
205. “Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” -Brooke Hampton
