Quotes that describe your homeschool. Your unschooling homeschool?

On the Radical Christian Unschooling email list, someone asked ~ What Bible verse describes your homeschool?

I got to thinking. Hmm. If not a Bible verse, than maybe a motto. A quote. A quote from a Saint?
I’ve continued to think about this . I have personal mottoes for each year, these help me when things seem tough or dreary. What would be a verse or quote or motto for our unschool?

I thought of the St Teresa of Avila one - "When you pray, pray. When you pheasant, pheasant!"

Background – read Cindy’s blog post.

I love St Teresa of Avila, have always found her to be,well, a practical saint. Love her writings in The Way of Perfection .


The other quote which may be fitting for our unschooling homeschool is this one from educator Charlotte Mason – Let the mother go out to play!


Full quote - "If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play! If she would have the courage to let everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a day, out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, without the children, life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. The mother would then be able to hold herself in "wise passiveness’ and would not fret her children by continual interference even of hand or eye - she would let them be."

Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason (January 1, 1842 – January 16, 1923) was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's education. Her ideas led to one of the primary methods of homeschooling. Wikipedia

Charlotte Mason talked about will. She encouraged parents and teachers not to use force but to gently encourage, to model, to use hero stories and saints stories and literature and tales to inspire children; and then to allow opportunities for kids to exhibit virtues…

"Let children alone-...the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions - a running fire of Do and Don’t ; but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way and grow to fruitful purpose."

"A child is a person in whom all possibilities are present - present now at this very moment - not to be induced after many years and efforts manifold on the part of the educator"