a place for unschoolers

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.

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.

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

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.

You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself.

I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

When was the last time you saw a tombstone with SAT scores inscribed on it?

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

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

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.

Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

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

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

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.