The best collection of homeschool/unschool quotes...

I came across this collection of quotes while surfing around the net...Enjoy!



"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

SOURCES :
(1) http://www.school-survival.net/quotes.php
(2)http://www.homeschool.co.uk/resource/homeschooling-and-education-quotes.html
(3) http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6529/index3.html
(4) http://www.nyctophilia.net/unschool/quotes.html
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BOOKS :
- An Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto
- Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto
- If You Want To Be Rich & Happy - Don't Go To School, by Robert Kiyosaki
- Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn
- Field Day, by Matt Hern

John Taylor Gatto

I'm currently reading the latest of John Taylor Gatto's EXCELLENT books on schooling, Weapons of Mass Instruction. It's, as are all of Mr. Gatto's books, an excellent and mind-boggling look into the history of compulsory schooling in our nation. I found this nice piece of video with Mr. Gatto, and though I'd share it here...For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Gatto, he was a 3 time New York City teacher of the year, and also won Teacher of the Year in NY state...He retired from teaching on the OpEd page of the New York times - you can read that letter HERE




Re-familiarizing myself with John's writings always seems to give me a great booter shot in the arm when I may be having those "now, WHY are we doing this?" moments...

Elementary (4th Grade) Geometry

Since I fancied myself smart enough to remember 4th grade math, I didn't order a "teacher's guide" for the math curriculum the little girl is using in conjunction with our Oak Meadow curriculum...Anyhow, I must confess, math was never something I had much interest in, therefore I did the "study enough to pass the test and then forget all about it" method for the majority (uh...ok, more like the entirety) of my math schooling. Today I had the need to run quickly to the computer for a "cheat sheet" of geometric shapes & their names...I'd forgotten what a rhombus was exactly...and while I was pretty certain that I knew what a polygon was, I needed to review!
Here's a handy printable for anyone else who may wish to freshen up the ol' brain reagrding the basic geometric figures & polygons!

Figures & Polygons

Winter Slideshow

I've been such a negligent blogger since our move...sigh...
here are some winter photos to prove we haven't dropped off the face of the earth!

Hard-to-spell-words

For some reason (ok...because I needed to spell-check "pronunciation") I started trying to amass a mental list of words that tend to trip me up spelling-wise...Now, I'm a classic "good speller" and let me tell you, when I read a few years back that being a "good speller" actually has ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING on intelligence, I was aghast! This can't be!!! I still don't buy it...

Anyhow...I'm trying to put together my own list of words that mess with my "good speller" head... I'll add 'em as I think of 'em...

What are yours????

I've had two glasses of wine, and it's 16 degrees outside...so I'm only coming up with a few right now...

pronunciation (why isn't it PRONOUNCE iation?)
vacuum (until I was in my 20's I spelled it vacum - thanks, Mom, for all those years of lists with VACUUM spelled practically as an obscenity!)
success (two c's or two s's or both?)

Give me yours, I will be honest if they're mine, too!

Lingua-Fun

We started working on our spanish again today...Amazing to me that even though we've been pretty big slackers in the spanish department lately, the kids pronunciation is on-spot! I picked up a card game/CD combo from LinguaFun a while back...today was the first time we tried it out...VERY COOL! The games are games the kids already know for the most part, but the cards incorporate spanish sentences into the play...


Also found this ...looks like it could be a great tool for time in the car! Hmmmmm...

This exciting week...

Well, this week will be an exciting one at our house! Not only are we getting back into our "learning groove" this week (between moving in the fall & then the holidaze, our "routine" has been anything but) we're also adopting a new family member on Wednesday! Tomorrow to get back into the swing, we'll play math games and review our times tables, plus guitar & a nature study (both kids are going to be working on a model of our local landscape/topography - we will begin collecting samples and observing the local terrain). We use the Oak Meadow curriculum to assist in our "unschooling" endeavors...now I know the hard-core "unschoolers" probably wouldn't consider what we do "unschooling" since I rely on a curriculum to guide me, but I find the OM materials really help guide me in guiding the kids' learning paths...and for our brand of "unschooling" they are a perfect fit. If you're interested in exploring OM you can check it out HERE
Oh...but back to our new family member...his name is Trenton, and he's 3 years old...His owner needed to find a new home for him due to her fiancee's very bad allergies...and lucky for us we've got the perfect home for him!
Isn't he gorgeous? We'll be sure to post photos on our exciting week as it transpires! Happy New Year to all!