Ellen Gilchrist Quotes

How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.

I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there and they are taught and told what to believe. They are passive from the very beginning, and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature and recognized that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, 'Do not educate'?

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.

We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.

Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.

We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction

Only the autodidacts are free.

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.

I believe in any kid's ability to read any book and form their own judgements. It's the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.

I try to stay out of my kids' way and kind of just let them discover things for themselves. Our job as parents is more to keep other people out of their way, so they're free to discover what works for them on their own.

Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

A true teacher doesn't teach you to think like him, but to think without him.

Children who are read to learn two things: First, that reading is worthwhile, and second, that they are worthwhile.

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.

I was home educated but would skip my lessons to go hang out at school.

It is imperative for US to parent our children and educate them outside of the school systems, as our education system was not designed to lift US out of oppression.

Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.