[Homeschooling]…recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons.

Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

The Lord calls each one of His children, no matter what his occupation-lawyer, doctor, maintenance man, carpenter, accountant, athlete, musician, teacher, homeschooling mom, and so on-to have a real prayer life.

As a homeschooling parent, I have often wondered who learns more in our family, the parent or the child. The topic I seem to be learning the most about is the nature of learning itself.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

My aim in homeschooling is to give my children the ability to be an adult learner, a skill set that will last the rest of their lives.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

Do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement.

Let the parent ask “Why?” and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him – and he will remember it – the reason why.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit. Because that person doesn’t need the goddamn government for anything.

I’ve been homeschooling for eight years and have always received the best advice and encouragement from other homeschoolers, rather than a book or lecture.

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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.

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

Education has for its object the formation of character.

A ‘school-at-home’ approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors.

Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

Homeschooling will certainly produce some socially awkward adults, but the odds are good they would have been just as quirky had they spent twelve years raising their hand for permission to go to the bathroom.

All the homeschooling parents I know meet on a regular basis with other families. They organize field trips, cooking classes, reading clubs and Scout troops. Their children tend to be happy, confident and socially engaged.

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

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 an education.

You must pray…without prayer, all the schooling in the world will not produce the effect God wants homeschooling to give.

Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

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.

Let early education be a sort of amusement. You will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

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

If the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself.

I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

The pupil is … ‘schooled‘ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

There is no other complex field in our society in which do-it-yourself beats out factory production or market production. Nobody makes his or her own car. But it is still the case that parents can perform the job of educating their children [homeschooling], in many cases better than our present education system.

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

The home is the first and most effective place to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self control, the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home.

I was anticipating that some readers might misread [the book] ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.

Knowledge is recognizing what you know and what you don’t.