January

"A child does not have to be motivated to learn; in fact, learning cannot be stopped. A child will focus on the world around him and long to understand it. He will want to know why things are the way they are. He won’t have to be told to be curious; he will just be curious. He has no desire to be ignorant; rather he wants to know everything."

- Valerie Fitzenreiter,
The Unprocessed Child: Living Without School

February

"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."

- Claude Monet

March

"Teach children what to think and you limit them to your ideas. Teach children how to think and their ideas are unlimited."

- Sandra Parks

April

"Misbehavior in children is an attempt to communicate, when all else has failed. Children have a drive to love other people and to be a contribution to the people around them. It is time for all children to be recognized as the magnificent people they are, and accorded the dignity and respect that is due every human being. We must establish a new way of seeing children."

- The Kids' Project
(Ann Fisher, Randal Schwartz, and Rick Lahrson)

May

"A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine will hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose."

- Queenie, in Queenie (1973) by Hortense Calisher

June

"I recognize June by the flowers, now. I used to know it by review tests, and restlessness."

- Lisa Asher, unschooled teen

July

"The wildest colts make the best horses."

- Plutarch

August

"Learning is the human activity that least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful activity."

- Ivan Illich

September

"Love the children extravagantly, with all your heart!"

- Pygmy proverb

October

"When we make a child afraid, we stop learning dead in its tracks."

- John Holt

November

"Meeting a child's dependency needs is the key to helping that child achieve independence. And children outgrow these needs according to their own unique timetable."

- Elizabeth Baldwin

December

"We are learning all the time - about the world and about ourselves. We learn without knowing that we are learning and we learn without effort every moment of the day. We learn what is interesting to us... and we learn from what makes sense to us, because there is nothing to learn from what confuses us except that it is confusing."

- Frank Smith,
The Book of Learning and Forgetting

More Quotes of the Month