Incendiary, Pro-homeschooling Quotes

The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents, so they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. - John Updike ( 'Connect' New York October 98 )


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



The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. ~ Hannah Arendt



The battle for humankind's future must be won in the public schools by teachers who correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old & the new, the rotting corpse of Christianity with all its adjacent evils & misery, and the new faith. ~ John Dunphy, The Humanist magazine


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


Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding. ~ Ezra Pound


Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. ~ William Butler Yeats


To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society. ~ President Theodore Roosevelt


Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it. ~ President William Howard Taft


Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. ~ John Ruskin


An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. ~ Thomas Moore


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


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


Our Lord wants us all to be the leaven in the dough of society. But He wants us to do this when we are properly prepared. Our job as parents is to prepare our children to be ready for the service to which God will call them. We need to furnish the children's minds and hearts with the true, the good and the beautiful, so that they may speak "in season and out of season" of the faith they have been given. (Laura Berquist "Character Formation" Sursum Corda Fall 1998)


It is necessary not only that religious instruction be given to the young at certain fixed times, but also that every other subject taught, be permeated with Christian piety. If this is wanting, if this sacred atmosphere does not pervade and warm the hearts of masters and scholars alike, little good can be expected from any kind of learning, and considerable harm will often be the consequence. (Pius XI, On Christian Education)


Unless a man's will has a purpose and it is a good one, education will do nothing for him except to fortify his own egotism. (Archbishop Fulton Sheen)


No amount of pious training or pious culture will protect the faithful, or preserve them from the contamination of the age, if they are left inferior to non-Catholics in secular learning and intellectual development. The faithful must be guarded and protected by being trained and disciplined to grapple with the false systems of the age…. They must be better armed than their opponents - surpass them in the strength and vigor of their minds, and in the extent and variety of their knowledge. They must, on all occasions and against all adversaries, be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them. (Orestes Brownson Catholic Polemics)


Hence every form of pedagogic naturalism …Every method of education founded, wholly or in part, on the denial or forgetfulness of original sin and of grace, and relying on the sole powers of human nature, is unsound. …If any of these terms are used, less properly, to denote the necessity of a gradually more active cooperation on the part of the pupil in his own education… this would be correct, but in no way new. It would mean only what has been taught and reduced to practice by the Church … in imitation of the method employed by God Himself towards His creatures, of whom He demands active cooperation according to the nature of each.(Pope Pius XI, On Christian Education)


True followers of Christ were meant to be at odds with the world: The pure of heart will be laughed at by the Freudians; the meek will be scorned by the Marxists; the humble will be walked on by the go-getters; the liberal Sadducees will call them reactionaries; the reactionary Pharisees will call them liberals.(Archbishop Fulton Sheen)


Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery-- the preconditions of all true freedom. Parents should teach their children to subordinate the "material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones." Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church #2223)


If it be true that the world has lost its respect for authority, it is only because it lost it first in the home. (Archbishop Fulton Sheen)


There is little point in keeping children out of Hell if you don't afford them the means of getting into Heaven. So give them solid catechetics, strong preaching, good example, healthy exercise, supervision in a general and determinant way but not in each particular and by all means permitting them the freedom of the good, dangerous books as well as the dangerous games such as football, or mountain climbing. Given the state of man, some will break their necks and sin; but in good Catholic families with common sense, the falls should be few and the bodies and souls recoverable. (John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture)