Philosophy Now Forum

i found these quotes about homeschooling on a homeschool website:

Unknown
Many well-known public figures were homeschooled, and many others wish they had been.


David Albert
My job is not to teach at all, but to find the opportunities for my kids to learn. NOT knowing something can be an advantage, as it reminds me of the wealth of resources out there in the community and world, if only we are willing to go look for them.


Isaac Asimov
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.


David and Micki Colfax
Homeschooling parents can ignore what are for the most part government directives as to what shall be taught and when. Rather, parents and children can work together to develop courses of study that address long-term needs, interests, and capabilities in the context of what they, and not a bureaucracy of somewhat dubious credibility, deem important and necessary.


John Taylor Gatto
One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.

If you live in a material universe where acquiring things is very important to you, then family is an absolute deterrent to maintaining that sort of a world, because family involves values like affection, and sympathy, and passion, and types of pleasure that lead nowhere in a material sense.


Sydney Harris
Children grow up believing that life is like school, with every question having an answer in the back of the book. Maturity consists in recognizing that life is a continuing series of multiple choice questions with the answers torn out of the back of the book.


John Holt
Since they were founded, the public schools have enjoyed almost limitless public trust and confidence. People might criticize them in detail, but in principle almost everyone agreed that the public schools were a great thing. The idea of an effective government monopoly in education was accepted almost without question. Now, suddenly, more and more citizens do not believe any longer that the government should have such a monopoly, and many are beginning to ask whether the government should be in the school business at all.

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.

Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.

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 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.


Larry and Susan Kaseman
How do children learn two very difficult skills, walking and talking, without anyone’s making a self-conscious effort to teach them? Could children learn other things, even “school” subjects like reading and math, in the same way, by imitating other people’s behavior, making mistakes, correcting them on their own, and asking for help when they need it?


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


Seymour Papert
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.


H. L. Mencken
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.


George Bernard Shaw
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.


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


Bruce Springsteen
We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school.

Well that tells me all I need to know about Springsteen.

John Taylor Gatto was named New York City Teacher of the year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. That same year, he wrote a letter announcing his retirement to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying that he did not want to “hurt children anymore.” He specifically promotes unschooling. (from Homeschool Alliance Website)

oh rortabend, i thought about you the other day. i was staring out the window at the fall leaves and thought about when i was sitting in the same place last winter on the most beautiful and memorable, amazing, (understatement) winter morning of my life, when you just happened to so fittingly post i believe it was Nietzsche playing the piano along with it. thanks:)

my brother and i spent two months with our great aunt and uncle deep in the Appalachians this summer

Many kids in that area are homeschooled, for all sorts of reasons

Some parents believe that the educational system is controlled by satanists and communists and islamic terror babies and stuff

some do not want their kids to spend three or more hours a day on a school bus

from what i have seen the results are ..... well.... mixed

there are plenty of examples that could be used to argue pro and con.

Under Evensonomics, the Department of Education would be abolished, all public schools would be shut down, including all publicly-owned universities, and education would be left to free-market capitalism. Let me tell you what's wrong with America: If you wanted to turn Harvard University into a whorehouse, and I'm not implying that it's not one already, who would you talk to?

You might be able to get a job for the UK government holding views like this. What would be taught at your free-market schools? Pepsiology, Evensonomics and McDonalds Studies?

I'm afraid free-market capitalism has no place in the UK. The only proper function of government is social integration, like a traffic cop keeping people from running over each other. Government should not own, operate, support or promote anything. Power to the people, my friend.

so with all the pros and cons, are you with homeschool or not, Kayla, Rortabend, bobevenson?

Home-schooling depends upon the aims and the skills of the parents or carers, academic home-schooling even more.

Hi Bob,

Sounds like those two sentences contradict each other Bob. I understand the desire to put into place things you feel are important, what I don't understand is why you feel it is important to have traffic cops to control people behind cars but not 'population' cops to control stronger people (mentally and physically) from 'running over' weaker people.

It appears to me all you are doing is promoting a dictatorship where you get to say what is controlled and what is not and to hell with anyone else. Same voice/different face...

Hi Bondi,

I think it depends on who is doing the homeschooling. I would not want my children homeschooled by me....I don't have the discipline nor do I have the intelligence capable of getting them to the level I wish them to achieve. I want my children to be better than me...not equal or worse.

hello auk and articsticsoulution, so are you with homeschool or not?

I thought I said I would not homeschool my kids. Did I not?

i apologize as, you do say that. you also said this, " I would not want my children homeschooled by me....I don't have the discipline nor do I have the intelligence capable of getting them to the level I wish them to achieve. I want my children to be better than me...not equal or worse."

i apologize, but may i ask you, what, makes you say this? and what would be better than you?

like i mentioned i met some kids who are getting homeschooled for all sorts of different reasons

but what i found out from them is that in many cases they cover in a couple of hours as much material as I cover in a day or two of school

now in many cases they get to spend the saved time performing various farm related tasks but that is still better than regular school. i'd rather spend a day shoveling manure than an hour listening to my social studies teacher going on about whatever the fuck it is she goes on about