Here are FIFTY great homeschooling quotes to encourage and inspire you to keep moving forward with your passion and desire to direct the education of your children! Some of these quotes have to do with homeschooling specifically while others have to do with education in general but still apply to homeschooling. I hope you enjoy reading these quotes and please feel free to share this post if you love some or all of these great quotes!

1.
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child’s natural bent.”
-Plato, The Republic

2.
“There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

3.
“I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.”
-Petronius, The Satyricon

4.
“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.”
-Ezra Pound

5.
“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”
-Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

6.
“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
-Ivan Illich

7.
“Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.”
-Charlotte M. Mason, An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education – More Mason

8.
“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.”
-H.L. Mencken

9.
“Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school environment, the teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn.”
-Gene Royer

10.
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think – rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.”
-James Beattie

11.
“You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.”
-Marilyn Howshall

12.
“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
 all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”
-Julia Ward Howe

13.
“To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.”
-Wendy Priesnitz

14.
“I was delighted to see him growing more cautious and skeptical about what he heard, especially when he heard it from someone in apparent authority. I think that is fundamental to a good education. And if it comes back to bite me from time to time, that’s a price worth paying.”
-Martine Millman, Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey

15.
“What’s the matter?” asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.

“Why—why,” said Elizabeth Ann, “I don’t know what I am at all. If I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?”

The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. “you aren’t any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You’re just yourself, aren’t you? What difference does it make what grade you’re in! And what’s the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don’t know your multiplication table?”
-Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Understood Betsy

16.
“As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today`s shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift.”
-Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

17.
“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.”
-John Holt

18, 19.
“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
“The key is to understand that our children don’t belong to us—they belong to God. Our goal as parents must not be limited by our own vision. I am a finite, sinful, selfish man. Why would I want to plan out my children’s future when I can entrust them to the infinite, omnipotent, immutable, sovereign Lord of the universe? I don’t want to tell God what to do with my children—I want Him to tell me!”
-Voddie T. Baucham Jr., Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God

20.
“Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things. It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work.”
-Lori McWilliam Pickert

21.
“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.”
-Quinn Cummings

22.
“So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they’re forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?”
-Steven James

23.
“I was shocked, however, to discover that homeschooling is not allowed in the Netherlands. I could only imagine that after legalizing pot, prostitution and gambling, they had to outlaw something.”
-Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling

24.
“Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.”
-Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve

25.
“Each of us is born with a crazy passion to learn. Each of us craves knowledge of our world and our place within it. 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.”
-ps pirro, 101 Reasons Why I Am An Unschooler

26.
“The process of socialization is nowhere near complete at age five or six, when modern children start spending up to half their waking hours taking their cues from other people’s children. Because they accompany their parents’ daily routine, homeschooled kids spend plenty of time interacting with people of all ages, which I think most people would agree is a far more natural, organic way to socialize.”
-Quinn Cummings, The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling

27.
“It is no wonder that Satan hates the family and has hurled his venom against it in the form of Communism.”
-William R. Bowen, American Government in Christian Perspective

28.
“In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.”
-C.S. Lewis

29.
“People always understood, sensibly enough, that before you could teach something you had to know it yourself. But only very recently did human beings get the extraordinary notion that in order to be able to teach what you knew you had to spend years being taught how to teach…”
-John Holt

30, 31.
“…you either write your own script or you become an actor in someone else’s…”

“If you put fleas in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations.”
-John Taylor Gatto

32.
“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
-Walter Scott

33.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
-Mark Twain

34.
“Nobody rises to low expectations.”
-Calvin Lloyd

35.
“You must pray…without prayer, all the schooling in the world will not produce the effect God wants homeschooling to give.”
-John Hardon

36.
“…we have come to realise that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.”
-Ivan Illich

37.
“A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.”
-Isabel Patterson, The God of the Machine

38.
“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.”
-John Lubbock

39.
“Great spirits have always been violently oppressed by mediocre minds.”
-Albert Einstein

40.
“He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn’t know.”
-George Simmel

41.
“He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”
-Albert Einstein

42.
“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less slowly. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table while a sweet-voiced teacher suggest that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw trees in flower pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences. ”
-Anne Sullivan

43.
“I am much afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which means are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must be corrupt.”
-Martin Luther

44.
“I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.”
-Sigrid Undset, Nobel Laureate

45.
“I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children’s heads. For it is not by learning rules that we acquire the powers of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness and refinement and by copious reading of the best authors.”
-Erasmus

46.
“I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.”
-St. Augustine

47.
“I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.”
-Thomas Edison

48.
“Thank goodness my education was neglected.”
-Beatrix Potter

49.
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
-Alejandro Jodorowsky

50.
When public schools are judged by how much art and music they have, by how many science experiments their students perform, by how much time they leave for recess and play, and by how much food they grow, rather than by tests they administer, then I will be confident that we are preparing our students for a future where they will be creative participants and makers of history rather than obedient drones for the ruling economic elite.
-Mark Naison

What are some of your favorite homeschooling quotes? Feel free to share in the comments below!!