If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued.
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.
It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.
Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.
It’s a most serious mistake to think that learning is an activity separate from the rest of life, that people do it best when they are not doing anything else and best of all in places where nothing else is done. p.278
By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a ‘child’, of being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good
We learn to do something by doing it.There is no other way.
Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.
Books … rarely if ever talk about what children can make of themselves about the powers that from the day or moment of birth are present in every child.
The true test of character is … how we behave when we don’t know what to do.
People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experiences they want their children to have.