“Homeschooling is an individual response to what increasing numbers of parents see as an educational system that fails to serve the needs of their children… Some teach their children at home for very clearly defined political, religious, philosophical, or pedagogical reasons, while others-perhaps even a majority-would be hard-pressed to say why, exactly, they teach their children at home. …Some teach their children at home because of what is being taught in the schools, while others choose to homeschool because of what is not being taught.”
- David and Micki Colfax (1988). Homeschooling for excellence. New York: Warner Books. pg. 37
“…a homeschool mom is a volunteer who is directly invested in the outcome of her child’s education. …In a homeschool environment the parents assume the direct responsibility for educating the children and preparing them for society. The focus is on the immediate family, which will last a lifetime, rather than a continually changing classroom of children. Therefore, it should be no surprise that homeschool parents go to great lengths to ensure that their children are being educated properly. It’s not just a job, it’s a way of life.”
-J. Michael Smith in the Washington Times
“Home schooling has clearly caught the imagination of the American public as we approach the 21 st century. Whether it is called home schooling, homeschooling, home education, home-based education, or home-centered learning, this age-old practice has experienced a rebirth and taken hold in every state of the Union.”
-Brian D. Ray, Ph. D.
“While we do not have government-dictated religion, we do have government-dictated belief systems, courtesy of the government schools. It is impossible to educate without working within some value-laden system, yet we cannot agree on a common set of values. Within a government-controlled school system, we can only do what the schools are already doing-impose one set of values at the expense of the others. The only solution is the one that saved our country from two centuries of religious warfare. Just as the founding fathers chose separation of church and state, we must now choose separation of school and state.”
-Cathy Duffy (1995). Government nannies: The cradle-to-grave agenda of goals 2000 and outcome based education. Oregon : Noble Publishing. pg. 251
“While the government, professional educators, and politicians are devising strategies for improvement, many parents today are not willing to wait for change in public schools while their children are in them and affected by them (Toch, 1991a). While many are moving toward private schools, there has also been a quiet, but significant migration to home education.”
-Brian D. Ray, Ph. D.
“Parents in any social milieu are never homogeneous in their attitudes; some will be responsible, some irresponsible. But if we return the responsibility for parenting and education to parents, the result will almost certainly be an increase in the number of parents who choose to be responsible.”
-Cathy Duffy (1995). Government nannies: The cradle-to-grave agenda of goals 2000 and outcome based education. Oregon : Noble Publishing. pp. 252-253
“In the wake of massive youth illiteracy, immorality, and rebellion against domestic authority, concerned parents all across America are exercising their right to teach their children at home. Hence, the thriving home schooling movement has become one of the most encouraging and hope-inspiring developments in our country today.”
-Ray E. Ballmann (1991). The how and why of home schooling. Illinois: Crossway Books. pg. 13.
“Effective educational approaches have been ever-elusive since professional educators, compulsory attendance laws, and state-controlled schools grew ubiquitous in America during the late 1800s. …Regardless of the true cause of failure to arrive at successful education for the masses in the United States, hundreds of thousands of parents have decided to not wait for professional educators and government-controlled schools to serve their children. These parents have literally taken the education of their children into their own hands-they home educate them.”
-Brian D. Ray, Ph. D.
“The huge majority of parents care about their children and want them to be educated. As long as the state assumed responsibility, the tendency existed for many parents to forget about sharing that responsibility.”
-Cathy Duffy (1995). Government nannies: The cradle-to-grave agenda of goals 2000 and outcome based education. Oregon: Noble Publishing. pg. 253
“All government originates in families, and if neglected there, it will hardly exist in society… The foundation of all free government and of all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. …The education of youth, [is] an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both the law and gospel rest for success.”
- Noah Webster’s First Edition of an American Dictionary of the English Language, 12 of Preface by Rosalie J. Slater (San Francisco: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1980)
“Home schoolers are not odd, but they are different in that they desire to raise their children with a radical view of life, a godly one! They choose morality, intelligence, and family commitment instead of the present societal mold of depravity, ignorance, and peer dependency. They want to be close to their children throughout all their growing years. They do not want to wake up one day and find out they are strangers to their own children. This is often the regrettable plight of well-intentioned parents. …Loving parents want children who have abiding values and respect for life. But this is not automatic. It only comes to those who are willing to affirm both their parental and constitutional rights and exercise them. It comes to those who are willing to pay the price and invest their time in their greatest earthly gift: their children.”
-Ray E. Ballmann (1991). The how and why of home schooling. Illinois : Crossway Books. pg. 27-28
“It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“Families should be encouraged to take a larger-not smaller-role in the education of the young. Parents willing to teach their own children at home should be aided by the schools, not regarded as freaks or lawbreakers. And parents should have more, not less, influence on the schools”
-Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave
“Parents would do better, it appears, not to concern themselves with the acquisition of reading skills, but to endeavor to provide their children with an appreciation for reading.”
- David and Micki Colfax (1988). Homeschooling for excellence. New York: Warner Books. pg. 55
“Some educators argue that home school parents are protecting their children from the ‘real world.’ Most home schoolers would probably disagree. What is the real world? It may be begging the question, but we do well to address the following: is the real world that lifestyle embellished on T.V. and movie screens with their sordid wickedness and vile filth? Is the real world primarily made up of violence, crime, rebellion, fornication, murder, perversion, and greed? Many would like your child to think so.”
-Ray E. Ballmann (1991). The how and why of home schooling. Illinois : Crossway Books. pg. 72
“The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” -Robert Maynard Hutchins
An Amish man once said, “I do not believe that the Amish way of life is the plan of salvation. I do believe that it is a real help to me in living in conformance to God’s will.”
The same can be said for homeschooling-it’s not the only way, but it is a real help for families trying to keep their lives in accordance with God’s will.
“It is high time parents wake up and realize that their children will never grow up to be God-fearing, self-governed, rugged individualists, if they are being controlled by government school standards and regulations… Any attempt to rebuild society must begin in the home. The only true and lasting solution to the educational dilemma that our country faces is to return our nation’s schools to private and parental control.”
-Michael J. McHugh (1991). Christian Perspectives on Home Education. Illinois: Christian Liberty Press. pg. 13
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
-Albert Einstein
“When the moral backbone of a nation is removed, a nation will surely collapse. The public schools have abandoned the absolute moral values and biblical morality on which our country was founded and have replaced them with the religion of humanism, where man is the measure of all things and values are determined by the individual. Therefore, when the bankrupt philosophy of humanism is adopted, and biblical morality is removed in the public schools, only chaos will reign.”
-Christopher J. Klicka (1992). The Right Choice: The Incredible Failure of Public Education and the Rising Hope of Home Schooling. Gresham, Oregon: Noble Publishing Associates. pg. 46
“Does anyone ask himself why it should take years an years to teach schoolchildren so-called ’sex education’? Obviously, it does not. What takes years and years is to wear down the values they were taught at home and lead them toward wholly different attitudes and wholly different conceptions of the world. Brainwashing takes time-and it takes this time away from academic subjects.”
-Thomas Sowell
“The homeschool method offers parents the right incentives to produce high quality citizens, while other systems fall short of this ideal. The public school is free to continue its path, and taxpayers, who include homeschoolers, are free to continue pouring money into a fundamentally flawed system. Eventually, the truth about homeschooling will become common knowledge, and America will be able to regain its place of educational leadership as it moves away from the public school model.”
-J. Michael Smith in the Washington Times
Home school parents are not hiding their children from the “real” world or the “relevant” world. We simply have a sense of the seasons of a child’s readiness to face various aspects of the world.
-Gregg Harris, 81, Schooling Choices
“Bill Bennett thinks the schools ought to get five more years to get back to where they were in 1963. ‘If they’re still bad,’ he says, ‘maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money, and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.’”
- Detroit News, Suzanne Fields, 6 October 1989
“God is the rightful and supreme Master and owner of all reasonable creatures, and their nearest and highest duties are to Him. Hence, to train a soul away from Him is robbery of God. He has not, indeed, committed to the state the duty of leading souls to Him as its appropriate task. This is committed to the family, and to His church. To educate the mind without purifying the heart, is but to place a sharp sword in the hand of a madman.”
-Robert Lewis Dabney, Discussions, Vol. IV, (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1979)
“The question of how the individual Christian family should respond to the plight of the public schools and their funding is best explained in terms of good neighborliness. A neighbor should take care of his own yard first. He should do all that is necessary to be sure that his share of the neighborhood is neat and clean and safe. If everyone would only sweep the street in front of his own house, the entire street would be clean. That is what homeschoolers are doing in the educational neighborhood.”
-Gregg Harris, 83-84, Schooling Choices
“A homeschool family is spending its own money rather than taxpayers’ funds.”
-J. Michael Smith in the Washington Times
“The concept of mass education as practiced in government schools is inferior education. It always has been and it always will be. The gradual impairment and loss of parental authority in and influence on the education of our youth is one of the most serious and momentous evils to beset American civilization. Millions of American families have been programmed into believing that the home was established to help the school train children.”
-Michael J. McHugh (1991). Christian Perspectives on Home Education. Illinois: Christian Liberty Press. pg. 6
“Home schoolers are not all recluses living in remote log cabins. Growing numbers of home schooling families live in or near cities, are well educated, and hold down normal jobs. They are not all afraid of the modern world… Home schoolers’ fierce independence does not lead to isolationism.”
-Hill, Paul T. (2000). Home schooling and the future of public education. Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1&2), 20-31, Page 23.
“In my discussion of the financial advantages of home schooling, I choose to dismiss public schooling on the grounds that it is not the quality of schooling I want to buy. Buying shoes on sale is no advantage if the size or the color is not what is needed. Therefore, no matter how inexpensive public schooling may be, it is not the education I want for my children. Bargain or no bargain, I’m shopping elsewhere.”
-Gregg Harris, 241, Schooling Choices
“Many parents have relinquished the major portion of their children’s social and educational development to civil government. This retreat from parental responsibility will eventually turn over the ultimate authority and control of children to the state. Government controlled education is socialized education, and socialized education always leads to social tyranny and a breakdown of the family. It is this breakdown of American families that has started what many have termed a ‘parental revolution,’ as parents seek to regain control of their children through alternative private education.”
-Michael J. McHugh (1991). Christian Perspectives on Home Education. Illinois: Christian Liberty Press. pg. 15
Educating children at home rather than at school is regarded by those who practice it as a quiet revolution amidst the storm of education change battering schools.
-Stephen Peter Goymer in HomeSchool Researcher.
“It is not as though our public classrooms are godless; it’s just that they have been replaced with a different god-the god of this world. Love of God has been substituted with self-centeredness and worldly, antifamily values. Traditional morality is largely ignored, while immorality is condoned.”
-Ray E. Ballmann (1991). The how and why of home schooling. Illinois : Crossway Books. pg. 20
Each home-educated student saves taxpayers an average of at least $7,100 every year.
-Brian D. Ray, Ph.D
“Home schooling does allow you to know where your kids are, every hour of the day. They are involved in wholesome, real-life activities. They’re studying and growing. They’re even changing their world for the better. They’re taking their first steps toward financial independence and reaching out for the first time to the world beyond our shores. That’s where they are. They’re at home. And that is very good for the family.”
-Gregg Harris, p. 229, Schooling Choices
“I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of Hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the holy scriptures, 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 men are not increasingly occupied with the word of God must become corrupt.”
- Martin Luther
Homeschoolers “are not abdicating from the American agreement. To the contrary, they are affirming it.”
-Patricia Lines, Ph.D.
“The lives of the home educated in decades to come and the heritage that they bequeath to their children may inscribe a sweeping, indelible, and immeasurable mark on the 21 st-century of America.”
-Brian D. Ray, Ph. D.
“The homeschool movement will likely exert influence in society that is disproportionate to its size. Why? A key reason is its successes. …Although home-school parents and their children are bucking the conventional practice of relying on typical educational institutions beginning at the age of 5 or 6 in groups of same-age peers with state-certified and largely state-trained teachers, the growing cadre of home-school parents are practicing what cultures have believed and practiced for centuries. That is, parents, families, and closely-tied social groups should be the ones to transmit culture, beliefs, and literacy with the utmost care and dedication.”
-Christopher J. Klicka (1992). The Right Choice: The Incredible Failure of Public Education and the Rising Hope of Home Schooling. Gresham, Oregon: Noble Publishing Associates. pg. 157
