Previous Quotes of the Month for 2016
January
"Since a child cannot survive without the care of others, love is its most important nourishment. The happiness of childhood, the allaying of the child's many fears and the healthy development of its self-confidence all depend directly upon love."
- Tenzin Gyatso,
The Fourteenth Dalai Lama
February
"School is as far away from the real world as possible. In school we learn that we cannot control our own destinies and that it is acceptable to let others govern our lives. In the real world we can take responsibility for choosing our own paths and governing our own lives. The real world is what we make it."
- Rue Kream,
Parenting A Free Child: An Unschooled Life
March
"Kids are born scientists. They're born probing the natural world that surrounds them. They'll lift up a rock. They'll pick up a bug. They'll pull petals off a flower. They'll ask you why the grass is green and the sky is blue, and they'll experiment with breakable things in your house. I think the best thing a parent can do, when raising a child, is simply get out of their way.
"It might mean they break a dish someday, because they're experimenting with how dishes roll down the corridor. But they'll learn something about how fragile something as brittle as glass can be. There's a lesson there. ... Exploration can become a fundamental part of what a growing child requires to become a thinking member of society."
- Neil deGrasse Tyson,
Learning how to think is empowerment (EarthSky)
April
"It is more important for a child to be comfortable and functional than to look normal."
- Sparrow Rose Jones,
No You Don't: Essays from an Unstrange Mind
May
"I'm certainly not an expert in the field, but most education today seems to be aimed toward supplying people with information on how to make money, and prepare themselves for making money, and has very little to do with preparing them for the problems that they meet in life on an emotional level and on a philosophical level."
- Marlon Brando,
"Meet Marlon Brando", Documentary 1966
June
"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
- Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
July
"We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it."
- Elie Wiesel (1928 - 2016)
August
"No matter the problem, kindness is always the right response. When your child is having a problem, stop, listen, then respond to the need, not the behavior. The behavior can be addressed later, after the need has been met, because only then is the door to effective communication truly open."
- L. R. Knost,
Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages
September
"When you teach a child something, you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself."
- Jean Piaget
October
"There are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million."
- Walt Streightiff
November
"Babies are born knowing everything that we as adults have forgotten."
- Felicia Thomas
More Quotes of the MonthDecember
"Curiosity is, in essence, the replacement for curriculum when unschooling. And that is why being curious is such an important trait for unschooling parents to embrace."
- Pam Laricchia,
Free to Live: Create a Thriving Unschooling Home