Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are institutions of compulsory treatment.
-Patrick Ferenga
To learn to know oneself, and to find a life worth living and work worth doing, is problem and challenge enough, without having to waste time on the fake and unworthy challenges of school.
-Patrick Ferenga and John Holt
Unschooling is allowing your child as much freedom to explore and learn from the world as you can comfortably bear as a parent.
-Patrick Farenga
We can allow our kids to learn and grow in the shelter and safety of a warm, loving, supportive family. We can ignore the strong messages from the dominant culture that kids need to develop and demonstrate their independence by physical separation from their families as they attend daycare, preschool, conventional schools, etc. Many homeschoolers define independence not by physical distance...
-Larry and Sue Kaseman
We did not homeschool our children to shelter them. We homeschooled them so that they would be able to take advantage of the far greater variety and quality of educational resources that the world offers, outside the stifling, regimented government institutions where by and large what is taught is propaganda and not functional knowledge, much less social skills. The picture that emerges is that of homeschooling as a natural extension of parenting, as something worth doing that can be done by anyone determined to find a way.
-E. McCullough
We learn something from everything we do, and everything that happens to us or is done to us.... It is the quality of our experiences, the satisfaction, excitement, or joy that we get or fail to get from them, that will determine how those experiences change us--in short, what we learn.... Our most rapid, efficient, far-reaching, useful, and permanent learning comes from our doing things that we ourselves have decided to do, and ... in doing such things we often need very little help or none at all.
-John Holt
We who live in artificial environments cannot any longer depend on nature or instinct to tell us how to bring up our children. We must study their growth and their development, discover their needs, and what are the obstacles that may hinder and obstruct them. Then we can construct an environment where they can grow naturally, not develop into problems.
-Miss Child
What's actually wrong is that children and parents are expected to believe that school activities are natural and good and proper for children. I believe that those activities are totally unnatural for children and therefore are bad for them. And I believe that when a child does not perform them as expected, the child is normal and the activities are abnormal and should not be engaged in. For many kids, school is hell because so much that they are expected to do is unnatural and uninteresting and irrelevant to their lives.
-Ned Vare
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
With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. ...A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.
-Stanley Milgram
If a child doesn't like, or doesn't fit into a situation (such as school), it does not mean that he is imperfect; it means that the situation is wrong for him. Get him out of the situation. Get him away from people who see him as defective, or as someone who is not developing properly.
-Ned Vare
If a parent is going to neglect a child, it's much easier to send a child to school for six to eight hours a day than to neglect a child at home.
-D. Stevenson
It is easy for us to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion: but when we have done this we have robbed him of the greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.
-Maria Montessori
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.
-Ivan Illich
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
-Emma Goldman
Of primary concern is the very real possibility that homeschooling might now become the very conduit for entry into our homes and personal lives, and that is a concern about which every family should be alarmed. If parents can not be trusted to mold and shape their children's learning, their thinking, their values, - where will that leave us?
-Helen Hegener
Our mission is to inspire and equip parents to help develop those gifts.
-Home Life Academy
Part of the problem is the institutionalized schooling to which we subject ourselves and our children. This form of schooling, euphemistically called 'education, ' has as its primary outcome the creation of consumers who are barely able to think for themselves and are always in need of some fix from somewhere, whether from television, more schooling, or therapy.
-Y. Progler
People spend a great deal of time...talking about how to make 'education' more effective and efficient, or how to do it or give it to more people, or how to reform or humanize it. But to make it more effective and efficient will only be to make it worse, and to help it do even more harm. It cannot be reformed, cannot be carried out wisely or humanely, because its purpose is neither wise nor humane.
-Patrick Ferenga
Perhaps at some point in the future, people will realize that children who are raised in a warm, cooperative, supportive environment by people who love them actually turn out better prepared for the real world than they would if they were sent at an early age to deal with strangers and large groups of their peers in a competitive and sometimes aggressive environment.
-Larry and Sue Kaseman
Rather than nurturing learning, the teacher's presence and questions often inhibit learning in children, making them think more about what the teacher wants rather than the actual subject at hand.
-Patrick Ferenga
Real objects validate the importance of their play, and play is the genuine work for their stage of life.
-Home Education Magazine
Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation, school administrators are really emphasizing the importance of 'celebrating' every child....though they seldom get into the specifics of exactly what 'celebrating' every child entails. We do know one thing it can't mean, however?it can't mean that schools are going to begin offering instruction that is individually tailored to each child's interests, abilities, and rate of development. Schools are not set up that way. They must, by design and constraint, offer mass instruction in a general curriculum to large groups of children in a specified sequence. That's what schooling is.
-E. McCullough
The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill conviction but to destroy the capacity to form any. The first lesson that is taught is how to accept confusion as your destiny.
From the second edition of Random House unabridged dictionary...'Socialization: a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.'...To be sure, the school system will 'socialize' your child according to the values and mores of today's society....One of the basic reasons that people choose to home school is so that their children CAN be properly socialized.
-M. Robinson
The biggest advantage is TIME! Time to think, to explore, to read, to build, to daydream. Homeschooled kids are allowed and encouraged to explore their gifts much earlier in life than schooled kids. I often wonder how much genius is missed because young people are not only not encouraged, they are not allowed the time to let their minds wander. The opportune time to explore our gifts is when we are young and do not know the artificial limits imposed by society....it's not a 'missed' road it's an alternative path.
-L. Buoni
The concepts of grade level; self-contained classrooms; learning upon command; breaking the fabric of knowledge into units of study that divide art from science, history from literature, and so on: focusing on competitive grades as measurements of academic achievement; the places, people, and rules of study; and, in particular, school's compulsory nature, remain largely unchanged...
-Patrick Ferenga
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
-Stanley Milgram
The earliest pioneers of social reform sought ways to speed up the assimilation of immigrant families into American society, because these immigrants carried with them strong family structures. The progressive social thinkers of the day determined that their children must be weaned from family loyalties in order to successfully identify with the larger values and goals of the just-emerging American society. Complete integration of the children could only be achieved if professionals took over the role that had previously belonged to the parents.
-Helen Hegener
The majority of children in this country will spend their days institutionalized, away from their families and loved ones, doing the bidding of strangers and being trained not to ask why.
-Helen Hegener
There is no doubt that to have perfect order in their surroundings and to preserve it by their own activity does give them real satisfaction. What the mysterious process in the mind may be we do not know....Whatever it is we have no doubt that the children who have this desire satisfied become calmer and are better able to overcome the difficulties of development.
-Miss Child
...Homeschooling has become so popular and well respected that everyone with a program to sell wants to capitalize on the term.
-Helen Hegener
...Slaves still know they're enslaved, and the last thing you want is to have to put down a rebellion. Far better for them to believe they're free, because then if they're unhappy the fault lies not with you but with them. It all starts with the children. If you don't start young enough, you'll never be able to acculturate them sufficiently so that they disbelieve in alternatives.
-D. Jensen
Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is. Research has shown that boredom is closely related to frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show.
-Fritz Redl
Caution: Homeschooling has been known to stimulate proper use of the brain which is not endorsed by government nor huge corporations involved in serious profit from a brainwashed and enslaved population.
I'm not talking to myself...I'm having a parent-teacher conference!
Homeschool Rules: 1. Relax 2. Learn
I AM in school right now and you're talking in class.
The only other place you will be: a) put in a totally supervised facility, b) subjected to a pre-planned routine and a largely unchanging environment that you are more or less powerless to change or escape, and c) where you are surrounded by people your own age all day long---is a nursing home.
We live in a country where the only limit to education is our own self-defeatist perspective.
-Tammy Takahashi, 'Deschooling Gently'
Government compulsory schooling is a huge business (one billion dollars a day in the U.S.!) that uses our tax money to fund a constant public relations campaign to convince us that they are doing a good job and that there is no viable alternative.
-Luz Shosie and Ned Vare
He who facilitates effective learning is not the sage on the stage, but the guide on the side.
-Unknown
Holt saw and worked to create a learning society in our culture, a society that welcomed its young into daily life whenever possible.
-Patrick Ferenga
Homeschooled children have many opportunities to observe their parents and other adults as they handle daily life. They see how much of adult life is cooperative and how adults handle situations that are competitive or aggressive. The adults they observe are better role models (at least most of the time) than would be a group of their peers who often lack the experience and maturity to deal with such challenges in ways.
-Larry and Sue Kaseman
Homeschooled children have more opportunity to observe real work being done than they would if they attended a conventional school. In conventional schools, just about the only real work is that done by custodians and cafeteria personnel. (If we didn't have the artificial world of schools, we wouldn't need the work that is done by teachers. People would learn by observing others, by having people of ages show them how to do things and explain things to them, and by getting involved themselves?the way most people have learned most of what they know throughout history.)
-Larry and Sue Kaseman
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 be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come 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 suggests 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 bead 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 experience.
-Anne Sullivan
I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you?
-Ray Bradbury
