PARENTING FREEDOM

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“If you want big-souled, large-hearted men or women, look for them among those who are much engaged among the young, bearing with their follies, and sympathising with their weaknesses for Jesus’ sake.”
C.H. Spurgeon

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
Beatrix Potter

“It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry.”
Albert Einstein

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Mark Twain

“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates–1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.”
Mark Twain

“All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.”
Mark Twain

“The function of schooling is threefold: To police, to baby-sit, and to break spirit. It does these so successfully that no reform is ever seriously attempted.”
Erik Erikson, psychiatrist, author of Identity Crisis

“I view public school as a burning building – and I’m going to save every child I can.”
John Holt

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”
Albert Einstein

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”
Ronald Reagan

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
Oscar Wilde

“Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.”
George Orwell

“People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.”
Helen Keller

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
Will Rogers

“Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.”
Will Rogers

“Truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is.”
C.S. Lewis

“Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.”
Aristotle

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Groucho Marx

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
Groucho Marx

“Only the educated are free.”
Epictetus

“It’s a greater work to educate a child, in the true and larger sense of the word, than to rule a state.”
William Ellery Channing

“The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.”
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss Cognitive Psychologist

“The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action.”
Herbert Spencer

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Albert Einstein

“The reformers did not merely curse the darkness; they were determined to work positively for the good of their neighbor and the glory of God.”
Michael Horton

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Theodore Roosevelt

“When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what is required.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“Christianity is not a religion that is based simply on vertical events that are wrestled out of the context of history. The biblical faith is rooted and grounded within the plane of real history.”
R.C. Sproul

“Your descendants shall gather your fruits.”
Virgil

“Our children cannot be parented by people whose names we hardly even know.”
Hold on to Your Kids p. 48

“I think it’s time to get our kids out [of public schools].”
Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family Radio, March 28, 2002

At the end of the book, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Edmund was “looking better than she had seen him look – oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong.” And this was on the last page, “Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”
C.S.Lewis

“Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
Charles Francis Potter, signer of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto & author of Humanism: A New Religion.

“True religion affords government its surest support. The future of this nation depends on the Christian training of the youth. It is impossible to govern without the Bible.”
George Washington

“An education without the Bible is useless.”
Noah Webster

“It is time we get our kids out of the public schools.”
Dr. Tim LaHaye, Left Behind Book Series and Pastor

“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon 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 slowly. Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table while a sweet-voiced teacher suggest that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw trees in flower pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.”
Anne Sullivan

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
Sir Walter Scott

“I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.”
St. Augustine

“In general the best teacher or care-giver cannot match a parent of even ordinary education and experience.”
Dr. Raymond Moore, Home Grown Kids (1981)

“It’s the end of summer
When you send your children to the moon.”
Dar Williams, The End Of The Summer

Homeschoolers “are the epitome of Brown students,” says Dean Joyce Reed. “They are self-directed, they take risks, and they don’t back off.”
Brown Alumni Magazine, “Homeschooling Comes of Age,” January/February 2002.

“We’ve got a whole lot of falsehoods associated with schooling,” says J. Gary Knowles, a University of Toronto researcher… “We have… weird rites of passage that are… quite dysfunctional.” Knowles has found homeschoolers to be more self-reliant and focused. “They’re able to move into adulthood with a much better sense of self and have a very good sense as to what they want to do,” he said… “Where did we ever get the idea that 2,000 13-year-olds were the ideal people with which to socialize other 13-year-olds?”
Fox News, “First Wave of Homeschoolers Comes of Age,” April 5, 2002

FLOWERS ARE RED
Harry Chapin

The little boy went first day of school
He got some crayons and started to draw
He put colors all over the paper
For colors was what he saw
And the teacher said… What you doin’ young man
I’m paintin’ flowers he said
She said… It’s not the time for art young man
And anyway flowers are green and red
There’s a time for everything young man
And a way it should be done
You’ve got to show concern for everyone else
For you’re not the only one

And she said…
Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen

But the little boy said…
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one

Well the teacher said… You’re sassy
There’s ways that things should be
And you’ll paint flowers the way they are
So repeat after me…

And she said…
Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen

But the little boy said…
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one

The teacher put him in a corner
She said… It’s for your own good…
And you won’t come out ’til you get it right
And are responding like you should
Well finally he got lonely
Frightened thoughts filled his head
And he went up to the teacher
And this is what he said… and he said

Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen

Time went by like it always does
And they moved to another town
And the little boy went to another school
And this is what he found
The teacher there was smilin’
She said… Painting should be fun
And there are so many colors in a flower
So let’s use every one

But that little boy painted flowers
In neat rows of green and red
And when the teacher asked him why
This is what he said… and he said
Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen.

“I am as sure as I am of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has never seen.”
A. A. Hodge in 1887

“[T]he parents have a duty to provide the child with a godly education … Wisdom rests on faith, and true knowledge has as its presupposition the sovereign God. There can be no neutrality in education. Education by the state will have statist ends. Education by the church will be geared to promoting the church.”
Rushdoony, Institutes, Vol I, 182.

“Why then did kindergarten succeed? The answer was and is clear-cut: the desire of women to get rid of their children. Educators had to set an age requirement for kindergarten children, else they would be deluged with mothers trying to push very young children into their hands. Thus, kindergarten has proven to be in part a polite and oblique form of infanticide, one which hypocritical women can indulge in while getting credit for solicitous motherhood.”
R. J. Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1963), 282-283.

Lee Duigon lists ten reasons why, “if you still have children in the public schools, you should pull them out as soon as possible.”

1. Public schools actively promote sodomy and other forms of immoral and risky behavior.
2. Public education undermines your children’s Christian beliefs.
3. The public school establishment resists any and all reform and will never get any better.
4. Academically, public schooling is geared to mediocrity.
5. Public education consumes at least $500 billion a year in tax money, much of which is wasted.
6. The public school is a hotbed of materialism and conspicuous consumption.
7. Public school is a crucible of peer pressure.
8. Removing children from public schools will weaken the power of teachers’ unions and make for a better America.
9. Public education is inefficient.
10. The whole purpose of public education is to transform America into a statist “democracy” to be “managed” by elites.

“Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.”
Ellwood P. Cubberley, Conceptions of Education (1909)

“In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.”
Helen Todd, “Why Children Work,” McClure’s Magazine (April 1913)

“In one experiment in Milwaukee, for example, 8,000 youth…were asked if they would return full-time to school if they were paid about the same wages as they earned at work; only 16 said they would.”
David Tyack, Managers of Virtue (1982)

“I pay the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys that educate my son.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.”
Robert Maynard Hutchins

“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Plato

“A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.”
Brander Matthews

“The future of the child is always the work of the mother.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

“If religion is not extended to the children, what will be the outcome?”
John Wesley

“If family religion be neglected – if care be not taken with the rising generation – will not the present revival of religion in a short time die away?”
John Wesley

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 2, 7, 18, 26/1, 26/3, 28 and 30, state, “All are equal under the law and are entitled to equal protection against discrimination. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their child.”

“It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It’s a bureaucratic system where everybody’s role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation.”
Albert Shanker

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Destroy the family, you destroy the country.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
Karl Marx

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
Josef Stalin

“Having children is not a question that we can afford to let each family, each household, decide for itself. … It is a question that should be decided at the national level. China is a socialist country. This means that the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the state. Where there is conflict between the interests of the state in reducing population and the interests of the individual in having children, it must be resolved in favor of the state.”
Chi An

“We can’t expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism.”
Nikita Khrushchev

“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the Future.”
Adolf Hitler, 1935

“The state will take youth and will give to youth its own education and its own upbringing. Your child already belongs to us… What are you?”
Adolf Hitler

“Give me the children and the country will follow.”
Fidel Castro

“I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.”
Dolly Parton

“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
Mark Twain

“There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.”
William Glasser

“I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that.”
Dick Gregory

“All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.”
Roald Dahl

“I educated myself. To me, school was boring.”
Van Morrison

“I have no patience with the stupidity of the average teacher of grammar who wastes precious years in hammering rules into children’s heads. For it is not by learning rules that we acquire the powers of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness and refinement and by copious reading of the best authors.”
Erasmus

“I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.”
Thomas Edison

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”
Agatha Christie

“Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school.”
Melinda Harmon, Federal Judge, 1996

“Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.”
Henry Fielding (1707 – 1754)

“There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.”
G.K. Chesterton

“I am much afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which means are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must be corrupt.”
Martin Luther

“For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”
Dorothy Sayers

“I’m sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of use in everyday life.”
Petronius (a.d. 66)

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

“The child’s social development is always retarded if the child does not have a single main mother figure constantly about him, ie, a person who has enough time and motherly love for the child. In this sentence, every word is equally important. Single does not mean two, three, or four persons. Constant means always the same person. Motherly means a person who shows all of the behavior toward the child which we designate as ‘motherly.’ Main mother figure means that secondary mother figures (father, brothers, sisters, grandparents) may support the main mother figure, but may not substitute for her. Person means that the respective adult has to support the child with his whole being and has to have time for the child.”
Theodore Helbrügge

“To be Queen Elizabeth within a certain area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, books, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene. I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No: A woman’s function is laborious because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
G. K. Chesterton

“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.”
John Holt

“A good mother is worth hundreds of schoolmasters.”
George Herbert

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.”
Henry Ward Beecher

“Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within the hearing of little children tends towards the formation of character.”
Hosea Ballou

“You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be
I had a mother who read to me.”
Strickland Gillilan

“That best academy, a mother’s knee.”
James Russell Lowell

“All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.”
Abraham Lincoln

“You cannot open a book without learning something.”
Confucius

“The road to knowledge begins with the turn of the page.”
Anonymous

“I cannot live without books.”
Thomas Jefferson

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”
Jorge Luis Borges

“A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.”
Henry Ward Beecher

“It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.”
Vincent van Gogh

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”
Abraham Lincoln

“You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
C. S. Lewis

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
Ernest Hemingway

“I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”
Stanley Kubrick

“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”
Desiderius Erasmus

“Books are the ever-burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.”
George William Curtis

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
Mark Twain

“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”
Walt Disney

“The more that you read,
the more things you will know.
The more that you learn,
the more places you’ll go.”
Dr. Seuss

“The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Nine tenths of education is encouragement.”
Anatole France, 1844-1924, French Author

“Formal education will make you a living, self education will make you a fortune.”
Jim Rohn

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
C. S. Lewis

“If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” Chinese Proverb

For more on this topic, choose from the following:
Essay ~ Bible Verses ~ Quotes ~ Academics ~ Activities ~ Controversy ~ Public School ~ Sex Ed. ~ Books, TV

Pre-School ~ K4 ~ K5 ~ Gr. 1 ~ Gr. 2 ~ Gr. 3 ~ Gr. 4 ~ Gr. 5 ~ Gr. 6 ~ Gr. 7 ~ Gr. 8 ~ Gr. 9 ~ Gr. 10 ~ Gr. 11 ~ Gr. 12 ~ High School

Reading ~ Math ~ History ~ Bible ~ Devotions ~ Primary Catechism ~ Westminster Shorter ~ Prepositions ~ Helping Verbs