What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children's growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn't a school at all.

Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this.

Children, who once looked to their parents for leadership, now turn to their teachers for knowledge, their peers for wisdom, and their music and televisions for entertainment.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.

Schooling that children are forced to endure—in which the subject matter is imposed by others and the “learning” is motivated by extrinsic rewards and punishments rather than by the children’s true interests—turns learning from a joyful activity into a chore, to be avoided whenever possible. Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.

You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

There is nothing to be gained by pretending that academic involvement is necessary, or even always desirable, in the quest for truth and knowledge.

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.

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