Many ideas about learning and education that are similar to unschooling date back thousands of years, and have been shared by thinkers, writers, artists, scientists, parents and business leaders alike. Here are some examples:
“Do not train children in learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Plato (428 - 348 BCE)
“While bodily labours performed under constraint do not harm the body, nothing that is learned with compulsion stays with the mind”
Plato (428 - 348 BCE)
“I hear, I forget; I see, I remember. I do, I understand.”
Old Chinese proverb
“Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
“To develop a complete mind: study the science of art; study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
And there be also some things both pleasant to be known, and as it were peace to children's wits, which to learn is rather a play than a labour. Howbeit childhood is not so weak which even for htis is the more meet to take pains and labour because they feel not what labour is.
Erasmus (1466 - 1535)
“Bring not up your children in learning by compulsion and feare, but by playing and pleasure.”
Roger Ascham (1515 - 1568) (tutor of Elizabeth I)
"You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself."
Galileo (1564 - 1642)
“Nothing should be taught to the young… unless it is not only permitted, but actually demanded by their age and mental strength.”
Comenius (1592 - 1670)
(on learning to read)
“Great care is to be taken that it never be made a business to him, nor he look on it as a task. We naturally… even from our cradles, love liberty and have therefore an aversion to many things for no reason but because they are enjoined to us.”
John Locke (1632 - 1704)
"Every boy learns more in his hours of play, than in his hours of labour"
William Godwin (1736 - 1856)
"Communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little as possible violence to, the volition and individual judgement of the person to be instructed."
William Godwin (1736 - 1856)
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895)
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)
"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
“From a very early age, I’ve had to interrupt my education to go to school.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
W.B. Yeats (1865 - 1939)
“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
Beatrix Potter (1866 - 1943)
“Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.”
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought”
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)
“The only time my education was interrupted was while I was at school.”
Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
"It is ...nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that he enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. "
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
“I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they can learn”
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)
(on children)
“You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
Khalil Ghibran (1883 - 1931)
“Neither comprehension nor learning can take place in an atmosphere of anxiety”
Rose Kennedy (1890 - 1995)
“When a subject becomes totally obsolete, we make it a required course.”
Peter Drucker (1909 - 2005)
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”
Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
“Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
Stanley Kubrik (1928 - 1999)
“I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students”
Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over”
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over”
Richard Branson (1950 - )
With thanks to the following sources, from which some of the above quotes have been taken:
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