Conventional schools operate only to manufacture human products for big international companies all over the world. If people continue to follow the path of conventional education system, they can’t survive rather can not shine and thrive in 21st century. Here are some excellent quotes by wise men and women to inspire and guide us to unschool ourselves and our future children.
“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“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
“There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.” -George Bernard Shaw
“The only thing I didn’t do in school was learn.” -unschooler Jason Lescalleet
“I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.” -Winston Churchill
“How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude.” -Winston Churchill
“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 amd 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
“Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.” -Madeleine L’Engle
“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” -George Santayana
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.” -Henry Adams
“We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge.” -Rutherford Rogers
“Every day I went to school was a constant attack on my self-worth. I learned not to believe in myself. It was a bombardment from all directions; the teachers were saying how bad I was doing in their classes, my family was ashamed of my grades, and the students were attacking me about everything under the sun! I was like a plant trying to grow in darkness–it doesn’t. It all left me afraid to dream my dreams-afraid to be my true self! Who wants to show their true self if they’re just going to get a rock hurled at it?! The real question is: how do we undo the damage done? We have to take time to dream again, not other peoples’, but our own precious dreams that mean everything to us. Our dreams are our life maps.” -unschooler Jenny Smith
“Before children go to school in the first place, all of their natural learning systems are intact. This is what we can see from families who have homeschooled their kids from the very beginning. However, once children are in school for about three years, they are forced to shift over to a very unnatural system to survive the emphasis on memorization and the daily stress, rigidity, and humiliation of classroom life.” -Judy Garvey
“You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” -Galileo
“I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be.” -Albert Einstein
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” -Albert Einstein
“It is… nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” -Albert Einstein
“When was the last time you saw a tombstone with SAT scores inscribed on it?” -Edward B. Fiske
“Most people, most of the time, learn most of what they know about science and technology outside of school.” -National Science Foundation
“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.” -Margaret Mead
“I hate, loathe and despise schools….School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.” -Maurice Sendak (author of “Where the Wild Things Are”)
“Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside. Most of the information received meant absolutely nothing to me. For example, I was chastised for not being able to remember what states border Nebraska and what are the states of the Gulf Coast. It was simply a matter of memorizing the names, nothing about the process of memorizing or any reason to memorize. Education without either meaning or excitement is impossible. I longed for the outdoors, leaving only a small part of my conscious self to pay attention to schoolwork.
“One day as I sat fidgeting in class the whole situation suddenly appeared very ridiculous to me. I burst into raucous peals of uncontrolled laughter, I could not stop. The class was first amused, then scared. I stood up, pointed at the teacher, and shrieked my scorn, hardly taking breath in between my howling paroxysms.” -Ansel Adams (who dropped out of school at age twelve and began taking photographs)
“Oh, yes, I went to the white man’s schools. I learned to read from schoolbooks, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on man-made pages. I turn to the Great Spirit’s book which is the whole of his creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. You know, if you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit had provided you and me with an opportunity for study in nature’s university, the forest, the rivers, the mountains, and the animals, which include us.” -Tatanga Mani, Stoney Indian
A letter from Native Americans to settlers, dated 1774:
We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen to not be the same with yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences, but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, …neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Councellors, they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind Offer, tho’ we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men out of them.
“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
“I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. 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
“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
“The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” -John Taylor Gatto
“There can be no education without leisure; and without leisure, education is worthless.” -Sarah Josepha Hale
“I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.” -Aleister Crowley
“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.” -Anna Freud
“If the student fails to learn, the teacher fails to teach.” -unknown
“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” -Oscar Wilde
“How is it that little children are so intelligent while men are so stupid? It must be education that does it.” -Alexandre Dumas, fils
“Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.” -Ilya Ehrenburg
“Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be ‘socialized.'” -Robert Lindner
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” -Plato
“Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.” -Mark Twain
“It is easier for a teacher to command than to teach.” -John Locke
“An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear.” -Nietzsche
“The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.” -Vauvenargues
“The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.” -Horace Mann
“Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.” -Lillian Smith
“I can’t give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma.” -L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
“School is like a lollipop. It sucks until it is gone.” -Ashley Salvati
“How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” -Henry D. Thoreau
“The more I think about it the more I think high school is seriously warped.” -J.S. Feliciano, Pump up the Volume
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” -Isaac Asimov
“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
“It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.” -Bertrand Russell
“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. Hey teacher, leave the kids alone.” -Pink Floyd
“Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.” -John Holt
“L“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einsteinife learning is about trusting kids to learn what they need to know and about helping them to learn and grow in their own ways. It is about respecting the everyday experiences that enable children to understand the world and their culture, and to interact with it.” Wendy Priesntz
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ~ Albert Einstein
“I spent three days a week for ten years educating myself in the public library, finding mirrors for myself in hundreds of books. At the end of ten years, I was completely educated. I had read every goddamn book in the library, and I’d written a thousand stories.” ~ Ray Bradbury
“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.” ~ Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal
“School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.” ~ H.L. Mencken
“None of the world’s problems will have a solution until the world’s individuals become thoroughly self-educated.” ~ Buckminster Fuller
“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
“We learn because we want to learn, because it’s important to us, because it’s natural, and because it’s impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes school to mess up a beautiful thing.” ~ Peggy Pirro
“As far as I have seen, at school…they aimed at blotting out one’s individuality.” ~ Franz Kafka
“We must demolish the institution of schooling because it impedes learning and enslaves children. Then we need to put both money and creativity into creating opportunities and infrastructures that respect children and help them learn.” Wendy Priesnitz
“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.” ~ Frank Zappa
“Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them. If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process…the independent scientist in the child disappears.” ~ John Holt
“Everything I am interested in, from cooking to electronics, is related to math. In real life you don’t have to worry about integrating math into other subjects. In real life, math already is integrated into everything else.” Anna Hoffstrom
“Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.” ~ Tom Hodgkinson
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” ~ Pablo Picasso
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.” ~ Ivan Illich
Compiled by Alwed Ekka