More Unschooling Quotes- John Holt

Today’s schools focus on indoctrination and socialization, rather than actual learning. Children learn better without school. School hinders children’s learning. As John Holt once said, children don’t fail despite school; they fail because of school. Look at some more John Holt quotes below:

“Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them”
~John Holt

“What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent – in the broadest and best sense, intelligent- is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.”
~John Holt

“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.”
~John Holt

“I can’t help noting that no cultures in the word that I have ever heard of make such a fuss about children’s bedtimes, and no cultures have so many adults who find it so hard either to go to sleep or wake up. Could these social facts be connected? I strongly suspect they are.”
~John Holt

Kudos for Unschooling

Forgive the rather long list of quotes. They were all so good!

“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

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

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
Albert Einstein

“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”
George Bernard Shaw

“School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.”
H.L. Mencken

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

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

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

“We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
John Updike

“I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be.”
Albert Einstein

“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.”
Margaret Mead

“I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.”
Woody Allen

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

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

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society

“Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind concieves of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessable only to those who carry the proper tags.”
Ivan Illich

“Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.”
G K Chesterton

“I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom”
Sigrid Undset (Nobel Prize winner)

“The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.” George Bernard Shaw

“There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school”
George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize winner)

“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 know. 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

“It is much easier to condemn a child than to understand a child.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti

“One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.” Gandhi

“I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.”
Edvard Grieg

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
Gertrude Stein

“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

“In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it…and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself.”
Grace Llewellyn

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.” - Frank Zappa

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.”
– Noam Chomsky

Our Deepest Fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-Marianne Williamson (sometimes attributed to Nelson Mandela)

From her book Return to Love