Autonomous Education Quotes

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.

Being homeschooled for half of my life allowed me to choose my own curriculum and find things I really enjoy, and that's kind of inspired me. I've always been intrigued in or interested in the topics I've been covering.

Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.

Don't get me wrong: school is good and all, but school is way too slow for me. Like, super slow. So I didn't want to go. I wanted to learn on my own with real life experiences.

Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.

The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught.

Learning the core curriculum cannot come through coercion. It must come through a recognition of the need to integrate with economic life.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily.

I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.

I happened to go to a school when I was a kid and that's all we did, pursue our own interests. It was kind of structured so you ended up knowing everything you were supposed to know, arithmetic, Latin, whatever it was. But almost always it was under your own initiative.

Some of the mission groups that have been responsible for our education have not been part of the government. In fact, they acted contrary to what the government had planned to do.

The most important education you get is your own - the one you learn in solitude.

I prefer home school because you learn more by yourself than when you're around other people because you get distracted.

Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own; not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.

School seemed unimportant, since I learned so much more on my own.

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should have the opportunity of teaching itself. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.

To deschool means to abolish the power of one person to oblige another.

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'?

I believe that whenever I want to learn something I can learn it much better and faster by myself if I'm motivated to learn it as opposed to kind of doing it in more a standard, institutionalized way.

I knew I had to find my own way of teaching.

My vision of the future is no longer of people taking exams and proceeding from secondary school to University but of passing from one stage of independence to a higher, by means of their own activity and effort of will.

I jumped into a world of musical learning that was very much led by myself and then I drew from the music that was all around me.

There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.