Ivan Illich Quotes

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.

The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of government and education.

Five years ago, Samira did not want to continue in the regular school system in Iran. To help her with her education, I set up a home school. It wasn't just for my family, it was open to other friends.

It disturbs me when Obama says in the State of the Union address that he wants to make dropping out of school at 18 illegal, because people learn differently and before there are forms of learning for every type of person in the world, we shouldn't be condemned for leaving.

School's not for everyone, but I'm not telling people to leave school.

Keep the Federal skunk out of our schools.

Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.

It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.

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

I pretty much left full-time, formal education when I was 11, so that was when I was taken out of the school system... The longest stretch I would go back for was a term and a half when I was about 14.

I believe there ought to be school choice, so that parents can choose within the public school system.

Thousands of present day students, like many of our Founding Fathers, are being taught at home.

I was home-schooled.

I didn't go to high school, and I didn't go to grade school either. Education, I think, is for refinement and is probably a liability.

I was home schooled starting in seventh grade.

My mom comes from a really out-there upbringing, so for her, the way she raised me is pretty disciplined. I was home-schooled but more really unschooled, really.

I actually went to film school, but I didn't like it. I'm basically self-taught.

I've been homeschooled since ninth grade.

I wasn't a great student. Just give me a school with no grades, and I'll be happy.

My parents have always been very supportive. I didn't go to school because my home was my school.

When we home schooled my oldest, Jasper, in eighth grade, I saw how empowering it is for a child to learn in their own way. That rebooted my thinking about education.

What we're doing now is we're saying that individual schools can spend the money on their own priorities, so that head teachers can decide what's truly important, because the big shift in approach on education that we're taking - which is different from what happened before - is that we trust teachers and we trust heads.

I never finished high school. In fact, I hated going to school.

Centuries have elapsed since schools were first established.... Because learning was viewed as the exclusive province of the samurai and his superiors, farmers, artisans, merchants and women have neglected it altogether.... There shall, in the future, be no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person .... Hereafter ... every man shall, of his own accord, subordinate all other matters to the education of his children.