The UNSCHOOLS

I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many things I have somehow absorbed …
                                                                              Mark Twain

It's not the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.
                                                                               Will Rogers

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
                                                                               Epictetus

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
                                                                               G. K. Chesterton

The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out.
Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.
                                                                               Dee Hock (founder of VISA)

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.
That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.
                                                                               Thomas Szasz

When I see an urchin, who ought to be enjoying holiday and strengthening his constitution by
wholesome exercise to bear the vicissitudes of the world in after-times, kidnapped and sent to school,
to sit on a bench for four or five hours together, employed in learning by rote what he is unable
to comprehend, I cannot help contemplating him as the slave and the victim of the vanity of the parent
and the folly of the teacher.
                                                                              James Kirke Paulding 1831

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years,
and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
                                                                               Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are now trusting to those who are against us in position and principle,
to fashion to their own form the minds and affections of our youth.
                                                                               Thomas Jefferson 1821

So go unlearn the lies we taught you.
                                                                               Professor Jacob Neusner (Brown University) 1981