Unschooling Quotes - Page 2

• How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there. I counted the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home.

  Winston Churchill

  Educational, Home, School

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• Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Inspirational, Education, Memories

  Leonardo (da Vinci) (1957). “Notebooks”

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• It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

  Alice Duer Miller

  Education, Children, Mean

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• Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

  John Dewey

  Life, Inspiring, Education

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• Learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

  Eric Hoffer

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  Speech on the Occasion of the Opening of the Governor General's Canadian Leadership Conference by Adrienne Clarkson in Winnipeg, archive.gg.ca. May 07, 2004.

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• Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.

  Winston Churchill

  Learning, School, Education And Freedom

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• 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, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, School, Boys

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.308, Vintage

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• When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.

  Paul Simon

  Education, Learning, School

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• What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Education, Real, Teaching

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more”, p.1933, e-artnow

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• It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

  Claude Monet

  Running, Home, Learning

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• Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

  Bell Hooks

  Children, Passion, Learning

  bell hooks (2013). “Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom”, p.13, Routledge

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• 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 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

  Jobs, Children, Teaching

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• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Learning, Men

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

  R. D. Laing

  Children, Men, Normal

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Education, Ideas, Useless

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.1, Simon and Schuster

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• 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 conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

  Ivan Illich

  Teacher, School, Pyramids

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• There are only two places in the world: over here and over there.

  George Carlin

  Two, World, France Paris

  George Carlin (2015). “3 x Carlin: An Orgy of George including Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?”, p.105, Hachette UK

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• Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

  Ilya Ehrenburg

  Character, Development, Today

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• Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

  William Blake

  Engineering, Genius, Improvement

  William Blake (2008). “The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake”, p.38, Univ of California Press

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• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

  R. D. Laing

  Men, Mind, Normal

  R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”

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• I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of the class.

  Thomas A. Edison

  Education, School, Class

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• Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.

  Frank Zappa

  Motivational, Senior, Educational

  "Song: "Hungry Freaks Daddy" ("Freak Out!")". June 27, 1966.

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• Calvin: Today for show and tell, I've brought a tiny miracle of nature: a single snowflake! I think we might all learn a lesson from how this utterly unique and exquisite crystal turns into an ordinary, boring molecule of water just like every other one when you bring it into the classroom. And now, while the analogy sinks in, I will be leaving you drips and going outside.

  Bill Watterson

  Learning, Unique, Thinking

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• There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Educational, School, People

  Parents and Children (1914) "School"

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• I always like to learn, but I don't always like to be taught.

  Winston Churchill

  Educational, Taught

  29 Copy quote