4T03g3ZF

1Russell Ackoff
2	
3	Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant.
4
5Stanley Kubrick
6
7	Interest can produce learning in a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a fire cracker.
8	
9	//Hmmm, which of these do we use at school?
10
11Thomas Jefferson
12
13	There is nothing more unequal than equal treatment of unequal people.
14	
15	//I think this is relevant to school
16	
17James Baldwin
18
19	It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
20	
21	//For if the country was in fact, trustful of the independent mind, it would've trusted us to learn by ourselves.
22	
23Thomas Moore
24
25	One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.
26	
27	//Precisely
28	
29Henry Adams
30	
31	Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
32	
33Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
34
35	They teach in academics far too many things, and far too much that is useless.
36	
37	None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
38	
39	In all the things we learn only from those whom we love.
40
41Peter Gray
42	
43	Our system has things backward. We should explore the world, discover our passion, and then--if we feel we need it--do a little schooling to develop skills needed to pursue that passion as a profession.	
44	
45Sir Walter Scott
46
47	All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
48
49Mark Twain 
50
51    I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
52	
53George Sampson
54
55	The well-meaning people who talk about education as if it were a substance distributable by coupon in large or small quantities never exhibit any understanding of the truth that you cannot teach anybody anything that he does not want to learn.
56	
57Steve Dasbach
58
59	Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic - why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students.
60	
61	//I am pretty sure we already ended up with that.
62
63Albert Einstein 
64 
65     It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate  plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. 
66	 
67     One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
68	 
69	 \\ Albert was unhappy in school. According to a story that he later told his son Hans Albert, “his teachers reported that . . . he was mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.” Einstein attributed his school problems to a disdain for compulsion, a tendency to do things his own way, and an unwillingness to do the work required by his teachers. He wrote that the spirit of discovery and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. Biographer Albrecht Fölsing, author of Albert Einstein: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1997), described him as an exceptionally bright, self-motivated learner who could get good scores when he wanted to, but refused to waste his time with school activities in which he saw little value.
70Wright Brothers
71	//No quotes, a bit of a biography
72	
73	//Milton Wright often allowed his children to stay home from school to work on their own projects. Orville eventually lost interest in school and dropped out completely. Wilbur was an excellent student but didn’t officially graduate from high school and decided that a college degree “would be money and time wasted.” Despite their lack of formal credentials, Orville and Wilbur were highly educated because they did a great deal of private study. In this way, their education was comparable to a four-year college degree. The brothers were clever and intelligent, especially in the areas of science and technology. They spent much of their time inventing mechanical toys, which helped them gain experience solving technical problems.
74	
75Nikola Tesla
76
77	Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary I thrived on my thoughts.
78	
79Plato 
80 
81	Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
82		
83	No traces of slavery ought to mix with the studies of a freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the mind.
84	
85	//Compulsory education is morally slavery.
86 
87Charles L. Black Jr. "The plight of the captive audience"
88	
89	\\He is talking about captive audience in general, not school, but it feels pretty relevant
90	
91	I stopped laughing just before the last installment came out. About that time, the Supreme Court uttered its judgment in the case of the Washington,D. C. "captive audience." The captives at bar had become such by being trapped in busses and by there being forced to listen to news, music, commercials, and other matter, all of such kind and in such proportion as seemed good to the captor bus company and its privies
92	
93	...
94	
95	But I tremble for the sanity of a society that talks, on the level of abstract principle, of the precious integrity of the individual mind, and all the while, on the level of concrete fact, forces the individual mind to spend a good part of every day under bombardment with whatever some crowd of promoters want to throw at it.
96	
97	I think this practice raises issues of high principle. I say this at the start because the toughest obstacle to be gotten over, in dealing with the subject in a vein of earnestness, is precisely the often-encountered feeling that the whole matter, whatever its rights and wrongs, is rather trivial-a bit of a fuss about nothing. I suggest that this feeling, where present, maybe in its origin associative rather than logical-that it fallaciously evaluates the interests invaded by forced listening in terms of the incontrovertible triviality and even trashiness of much of the stuff the captive audience has to listen to. To drag this association into the open is to rob it of force. Subjecting a man, willy-nilly and day after day, to intellectual forced-feeding on trivial fare, is not itself a trivial matter; to insist, by the effective gesture of coercion, that a man's right to dispose of his own faculties stops short of the interest of another in -forcing him to endure paid-up banality, is not itself banal, but rather a sinister symbol of relative weighting of the independence of the mind of man and the lust to make a buck.
98	
99	...
100	
101	We hire halls in which to tell one another how much we respect the Mind of Man. But as Man rides the bus home from the lecture, what is the bus radio saying, beneath its acquiesced-in blarings, in the solemn gesture-language of the deed?
102	
103	//Only 14 pages, I highly suggest it.
104
105Upton Sinclaire, "The Jungle"
106
107	It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
108	//i.e. well-meaning schoolteachers, though again
109William Orton
110
111	If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
112	//Precisely what happens to students at school
113
114Mark Twain 
115
116    Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
117	
118	//Not sure about soap.
119	
120    Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
121 
122Oscar Wilde
123
124    The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence. 
125    
126	Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
127	
128Winston Churchill 
129
130    How I hated schools, and what a life of anxiety I lived there. I counted the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home.
131	
132    I always like to learn, but I don't always like to be taught. 
133
134Helen Todd, "Why Children work", McClure's Magazine, April 1913
135	
136	In 1909 a factory inspector did an informal survey of 500 working children in 20 factories. She found that 412 of them would rather work in the terrible conditions of the factories than return to school.
137	
138George Bernard Shaw 
139 
140    There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.
141    What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
142	My schooling not only failed to teach me what what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
143
144Martin Luther King
145
146	The group consisting of mother, father, and child is the main educational agency of mankind.
147
148Henry Ford
149
150	Education is pre-eminently a matter of quality, not quantity.
151	
152	//Henry Ford was homeschooled.
153
154Richard Yates
155	
156	They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.
157	
158	//And by a long stretch.
159	
160Finley Peter Dunne 
161 
162    It don't make much difference what you study, so long as you don't like it.
163	
164	The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
165	
166Thomas Edison 
167 
168    I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of the class.
169 
170Henry David Thoreau 
171 
172    What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. 
173    How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
174 
175Bertrand Russell 
176 
177    Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
178	
179    Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. 
180	
181	What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.
182	
183	It is because modern education is seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great result.
184	
185	If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
186	
187Benjamin Franklin 
188 
189    He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on. 
190	
191H. L. Mencken 
192 
193    The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
194	
195	What is the purpose of industrial education? To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence? Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
196
197Baruch Spinoza
198	
199	Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
200
201George Saville, Marquis of Hallifax 
202 
203    The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.
204	
205Joseph Stalin (Hmmm, a supporter of compulsory schooling.) 
206 
207    Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. 
208 
209Norman Douglas 
210 
211    Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes. 
212	
213Paul Karl Feyerabend 
214 
215    The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. 
216 
217Theodore Roosevelt 
218 
219    A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad. 
220	
221	//Yeah, because of his skyrocketing student loan debt, he may try to steal the whole railroad.
222H. H. Munro 
223 
224    But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school. 
225
226Robert Frost 
227 
228    Education is hanging around until you've caught on. 
229 
230Gilbert K. Chesterton 
231 
232    Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
233	
234	//Schooling
235	
236	The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive common people of their common sense. 
237
238David Hume
239	
240	Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
241
242Montesquieu
243
244	There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
245	//i.e. compulsory education
246
247Thomas Hobbe
248	
249	It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
250
251Voltaire
252
253	Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
254
255	Common sense is not so common.
256
257Aristotle
258
259	Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
260	
261Ralph Waldo Emerson 
262 
263    I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the schoolboys who educate my son.
264	
265	We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
266	
267	One of the benefits of college education is to show the boy its little avail.
268	
269	Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
270	
271	I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
272	
273Alice James 
274 
275    I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 
276	
277Helen Beatrix Potter 
278 
279    Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. 
280 
281Margaret Mead 
282 
283    My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. 
284 
285William Hazlitt 
286 
287    Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
288	
289Laurence J. Peter 
290 
291    Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
292 
293Anne Sullivan
294
295	I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience.
296	
297	
298Alice Duer Miller 
299 
300    It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.
301	
302Florence King 
303 
304    Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.
305	
306Emma Goldman 
307 
308    Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other. 
309	
310Edward M. Forster 
311 
312    Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
313	
314William John Bennett 
315 
316    If [our schools] are still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.
317 
318John Updike 
319 
320    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.
321 
322Robert Buzzell 
323 
324    The mark of a true MBA is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt. 
325	
326Robert M. Hutchins 
327 
328    The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty. 
329    The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness. 
330 
331Elbert Hubbard 
332 
333    You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think. 
334 
335Max Leon Forman 
336 
337    Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little as he can for his money. 
338 
339Phillip K. Dick 
340 
341    The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking. 
342 
343David P. Gardner 
344 
345    Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least. 
346 
347Ivan Illich 
348
349	School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
350    The public school has become the established church of secular society. 
351    
352	I owe my interest in public education to Everett Reimer. Until we first met in Puerto Rico in 1958, I had never questioned the value of extending obligatory schooling to all people. Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
353	
354	Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education--and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.
355	
356	Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature.
357	
358	Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
359	
360	In these essays, I will show that the institutionalization of values leads inevitably to physical pollution, social polarization, and psychological impotence: three dimensions in a process of global degradation and modernized misery. I will explain how this process of degradation is accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or "treatments." I do this because I believe that most of the research now going on about the future tends to advocate further increases in the institutionalization of values and that we must define conditions which would permit precisely the contrary to happen. We need research on the possible use of technology to create institutions which serve personal, creative, and autonomous interaction and the emergence of values which cannot be substantially controlled by technocrats. We need counterfoil research to current futurology.
361	
362	I want to raise the general question of the mutual definition of man's nature and the nature of modern institutions which characterizes our world view and language. To do so, I have chosen the school as my paradigm, and I therefore deal only indirectly with other bureaucratic agencies of the corporate state: the consumer-family, the party, the army, the church, the media. My analysis of the hidden curriculum of school should make it evident that public education would profit from the deschooling of society, just as family life, politics, security, faith, and communication would profit from an analogous process.I begin my analysis, in this first essay, by trying to convey what the deschooling of a schooled society might mean. In this context, it should be easier to understand my choice of the five specific aspects relevant to this process with which I deal in the subsequent chapters.Not only education but social reality itself has become schooled. It costs roughly the same to school both rich and poor in the same dependency. The yearly expenditure per pupil in the slums and in the rich suburbs of any one of twenty U.S. cities lies in the same range-and sometimes is favorable to the poor (Penrose B. Jackson, Trends in Elementary and Secondary Education Expenditures: Central City and Suburban Comparisons 1965 to 1968, U.S. Office of Education, Office of Program and Planning Evaluation, June 1969). Rich and poor alike depend on schools and hospitals which guide their lives, form their world view, and define for them what is legitimate and what is not. Both view doctoring oneself as irresponsible, learning on one's own as unreliable, and community organization, when not paid for by those in authority, as a form of aggression or subversion. For both groups the reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. The progressive underdevelopment of self- and community-reliance is even more typical in Westchester than it is in the northeast of Brazil. Everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs "deschooling."
363	
364	//See, Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich for the whole.
365 
366Marshall McLuhan 
367 
368    The school system ... is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing. 
369	
370Michel De Montaigne 
371 
372    We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void. 
373	
374	If, as is our custom, the teachers undertake to regulate many minds of such different capacities and forms with the same lesson and a similar measure of guidance, it is no wonder if in a whole race of children they find barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their teaching.
375	
376Peter Drucker 
377
378    When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. 
379 
380C. C. Colton 
381 
382    Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer. 
383 
384Paul Simon 
385 
386    When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. 
387 
388John Dewey 
389 
390    It is our American habit, if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory, to add another story or a wing.
391	
392	Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
393	
394Paul Graham
395	For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.
396	Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done.
397	It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
398	It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life.
399
400Ron Paul
401
402	I've sometimes wondered why those who would never dream of forcibly taking people's money to pay to support a religious belief they do not share have no hesitation at all in taking their money to support an educational philosophy they do not share.
403	
404Max Belz
405	
406	I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state.
407
408John Taylor Gatto
409
410	Overproduction has to be stopped is the policy belief. Schools are the principal factory in which that is done; consumption on the other hand has to be enhanced -- and no condition stimulates consumption like boredom, especially when the imagination and the inner life have been paralyzed by endless memory drills, the synthetic crises of continual testing, and a thorough conditioning in rewards and punishments, the game of winners and losers. Do people actually think this way? If you ask me that question, I'd have to reply with some sorrow: Yes
411	
412	The Cauldron of Broken Time
413
414	When time is  tightly scheduled, we are compelled to attend more to the appearances of attention and concern than to the reality of those qualities; without uninterrupted time you haven't a prayer of synthesizing the fact bits thrown at you. It's possible to memorize the official meaning of those bits, but in the time available no possibility remains of arriving at your own careful conclusions. After years of study, we know that uninterrupted sleep time is essential for precision in thought, but as Claire Wolfe, a  west coast writer once taught me, uninterrupted waking time is similarly essential. When you can't concentrate, it's hard to make sense of things. Rather than persist in trying, it's easier just to quit. The destruction of uninterrupted time is  a major weapon of mass instruction. Schools are a  rat's maze of frantic activity,: bells, loud-speakers, messengers pounding on classroom doors, shrieks from the playground, official visitors, unofficial visitors, toilet interruptions coming and going, catcalls, bullyings and flirtings -you never know when the next interruption will appear. Try to reckon the psychological effect of being plunged into a  cauldron of broken time, in Miss Wolfe's phrase, again and again for 12 years (in the student's case) and even longer in the teacher's. Personal time is the only time we have in which to build theories, test hypotheses of our own, and speculate how the bits of in-formation our senses gather might be connected. Time allows us to add quality to our undertakings. It took only one knock at the door to ruin Coleridge's mighty poem Kubla Khan. I wasn't that sensitive as a classroom teacher, but after three interruptions --and my years in harness averaged seven per class hour -- my brains were so scrambled I faked the rest of the lesson.
415	
416	Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy - these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
417	
418	It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.
419	
420	It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.
421	It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
422	It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework".
423	"How will they learn to read?" you say and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.
424	But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society we've made.
425	I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
426	
427Wendell Phillips
428	
429	Boredom is, after all, a form of criticism
430
431Mahatma Gandhi
432
433	Fearlessness is the foundation of all education, the beginning and not the end. If you do not build on that foundation, the edifice of all your education will topple over.
434
435Carl Rogers
436
437	I think my deepest criticism of the educational system . . . is that it’s all based upon a distrust of the student. Don’t trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not.
438	If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
439
440George Orwell
441	
442	This business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog being jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable.
443
444Count Leo Tolstoy
445
446	Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality — and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated. "Education and Children" (1862)
447
448Isaac Asimov
449
450	Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
451	Once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference materials, be something you’re interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else… that’s what YOU are interested in, and you can ask, and you can find out, and you can do it in your own home, at your own speed, in your own direction, in your own time… Then, everyone would enjoy learning. Nowadays, what people call learning is forced on you, and everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class, and everyone is different.
452
453Peter Gray
454
455	If one wanted an education, not a degree, there would be no reason at all to attend a university. That's been true for a long time, but it's now completely obvious to anyone who gives it a moment's thought.
456
457Leonardo Da Vinci
458	
459	Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
460	It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
461
462Anonymous
463 
464    If nobody dropped out of eighth grade, who would hire the college graduates? 
465    Public school is a place of detention for children placed in the care of teachers who are afraid of the principal, principals who are afraid of the school board, school boards who are afraid of the parents, parents who are afraid of the children, and children who are afraid of nobody.
466    The creative person is usually rebellious. He or she is the survivor of a trauma called education.
467	The child who attends public school generally 1,100 hours a year there, but only twenty percent of these - 220 - are spent, as the educators say, 'on task'. Nearly 900 hours, or eighty percent, are squandered on what are essentially organizational matters. 
468
469Jacques Ellul
470	
471	Critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment .... The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of the truth by...the word of experts.
472
473John Holt
474	Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn't know, better at finding and figuring things out, and more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his schooling - or, unless he is very unusual and very lucky, for the rest of his life. Already, by paying close attention to and interacting with the world and people around him, and without any school-type formal instruction, he has done a task far more difficult, complicated and abstract than anything he will be asked to do in school, or than any of his teachers has done for years. He has solved the mystery of language. He has discovered it - babies don't even know that language exists - and he has found out how it works and learned to use it. He has done it by exploring, by experimenting, by developing his own model of the grammar of language, by trying it out and seeing whether it works, by gradually changing it and refining it until it does work. And while he has been doing this, he has been learning other things as well, including many of the "concepts" that the schools think only they can teach him, and many that are more complicated than the ones they do try to teach him.
475	
476	In he comes, this curious, patient, determined, energetic, skillful learner. We sit him down at a desk, and what do we teach him? Many things. First, that learning is separate from living. "You come to school to learn," we tell him, as if the child hadn't been learning before, as if living were out there and learning were in here, and there were no connection between the two. Secondly, that he cannot be trusted to learn and is no good at it. Everything we teach about reading, a task far simpler than many that the child has already mastered, says to him, "If we don't make you read, you won't, and if you don't do it exactly the way we tell you, you can't". In short, he comes to feel that learning is a passive process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you do for yourself.
477	
478	In a great many other ways he learns that he is worthless, untrustworthy, fit only to take other people's orders, a blank sheet for other people to write on. Oh, we make a lot of nice noises in school about respect for the child and individual differences, and the like. But our acts, as opposed to our talk, says to the child, "Your experience, your concerns, your curiosities, your needs, what you know, what you want, what you wonder about, what you hope for, what you fear, what you like and dislike, what you are good at or not so good at - all this is of not the slightest importance, it counts for nothing. What counts here, and the only thing that counts, is what we know, what we think is important, what we want you to do, think and be." The child soon learns not to ask questions - the teacher isn't there to satisfy his curiosity. Having learned to hide his curiosity, he later learns to be ashamed of it. Given no chance to find out who he is - and to develop that person, whoever it is - he soon comes to accept the adults' evaluation of him.
479	
480	He learns many other things. He learns that to be wrong, uncertain, confused, is a crime. Right answers are what the school wants, and he learns countless strategies for prying these answers out of the teacher, for conning her into thinking he knows what he doesn't know. He learns to dodge, bluff, fake, cheat. He learns to be lazy! Before he came to school, he would work for hours on end, on his own, with no thought of reward, at the business of making sense of the world and gaining competence in it. In school he learns, like every buck private, how to goldbrick, how not to work when the sergeant isn't looking, how to know when he is looking, how to make him think you are working even when he is looking. He learns that in real life you don't do anything unless you are bribed, bullied or conned into doing it, that nothing is worth doing for its own sake, or that if it is, you can't do it in school. He learns to be bored, to work with a small part of his mind, to escape from the reality around him into daydreams and fantasies - but not like the fantasies of his preschool years, in which he played a very active part.
481	Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.
482	
483	We destroy the disinterested (I do not mean uninterested) love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards — gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards… in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else…. We kill, not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious, so that by the age of ten most of them will not ask questions, and will show a good deal of scorn for the few who do.
484	
485	The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.
486	
487	
488	Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
489	
490	Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.
491	
492	It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool part of our lives.
493	Children are born with the ability to learn whatever they need to know and will do so, as long as they are not hindered by well-meaning people trying to teach them.
494	
495	It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.
496	
497	We need to get kids out of the school buildings, and give them a chance to learn about the world at first hand. It is a very recent idea, and a crazy one, that the way to teach our young people about the world they live in is to take them out of it and shut them up in brick boxes. Aside from their parents, most children never have any close contact with any adults except people whose sole business is children. No wonder they have no idea what adult life or work is like. A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time - if corrected too much, he will stop talking. He compares, a thousand times a day, the difference between language as he uses it and as those around him use it. Bit by bit, he makes the necessary changes to make his language like other people's. In the same way, kids learning to do all the other things they learn without adult teachers - to walk, run, climb, whistle, ride a bike, skate, play games, jump rope - compare their own performance with what more skilled people do, and slowly make the needed changes. But in school we never give a child a chance to detect his mistakes, let alone correct them. We do it all for him. We act as if we thought he would never notice a mistake unless it was pointed out to him, or correct it unless he was made to. Soon he becomes dependent on the expert. We should let him do it himself. Let him figure out what this word says, what is the answer to that problem, whether this is a good way of saying or doing this or that. Our job should be to help him when he tells us that he can't find a way to get the right answer. Let's get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don't know now, and we never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands. We certainly can't find out by asking him questions. All we find out is what he doesn't know which is what most tests are for, anyway. Throw it all out, and let the child learn what every educated person must someday learn, how to measure his own understanding, how to know what he knows or does not know.
498
499	People remember only what is interesting and useful to them, what helps them make sense of the world, or helps them get along in it. All else they quickly forget, if they ever learn it at all. The idea of a "body of knowledge," to be picked up in school and used for the rest of one' s life, is nonsense in a world as complicated and rapidly changing as ours. Anyway, the most important questions and problems of our time are not in the curriculum, not even in the universities, let alone the schools.
500	
501	//See George Sampson (above)
502	
503Seymour Papert
504	
505	Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.
506	
507	The role of the teacher should be to create the conditions of invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.
508	
509	Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and what people learn.
510	
511R.D. Laing
512
513	The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
514
515Jules Henry
516
517	The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.
518
519John Locke
520
521	All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
522	
523	What worries you, masters you.
524	
525	Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
526	
527Linda Darling-Hammond
528	
529	If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.
530
531Tom Hodgkinson
532	
533	Education itself is a putting off, a postponement; we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about.
534
535Wendy Priesnitz
536	
537	Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted.
538	Because schools suffocate children’s hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it. As a society, we must own up to the damage we do to our children…in our families and in our schools. We must also be willing to make the sweeping changes in our institutions, public policies and personal lives that are necessary to reverse that harm to our children and to our society.
539	Home-based education is not an experiment. It’s how people learned to function in the world for centuries. And there is no reason to think people today can’t do the same thing. School is the experiment… And that experiment is in trouble.
540	Schools have not necessarily much to do with education… they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.
541	One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now called ‘learned incompetency’ and a fear of not being able to do things ‘right’ the first time.
542	We must demolish the institution of schooling because it impedes learning and enslaves children. Then we need to put both money and creativity into creating opportunities and infrastructures that respect children and help them learn.
543	
544Noam Chomsky
545	
546	The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
547
548Grace Llewellyn
549	
550	In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: forget about it. Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it. One day, you will glance up at your collection of Japanese literature, or trip over the solar oven you built, and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself.
551	All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.
552	
553Jeff Jarvis
554	
555	Educators – like musicians, journalists, carmakers, and bankers before them – won’t know what hit them. But as sure as change is overtaking every other sector of society, it will overtake education – as well it should. Our cookie-cutter, one-pace-fits-all, test-focused system is not up to the task of teaching the creators of the new Googles. Call me a utopian but I imagine a new educational ecology where students may take courses from anywhere and instructors may select any students, where courses are collaborative and public, where creativity is nurtured as Google nurtures it, where making mistakes well is valued over sameness and safety, where education continues long past age 21, where tests and degrees matter less than one’s own portfolio of work, where the gift economy may turn anyone with knowledge into teachers, where the skills of research and reasoning and skepticism are valued over the skills of memorization and calculation, and where universities teach an abundance of knowledge to those who want it rather than manage a scarcity of seats in a class.
556	
557John Ralston Paul
558
559	Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship. “Voltaire’s Bastards”
560
561Tom Peter
562	
563	I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers…creativity above fact regurgitation…individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance….. And we must reject all notions of ‘reform’ that serve up more of the same: more testing, more ‘standards’, more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.
564
565David T Kearns, CEO Xerox
566	
567	Our large schools are organized like a factory of the late 19th century: top down, command control management, a system designed to stifle creativity and independent judgment.
568
569Vitto Perrone
570	
571	There is, it seems, more concern about whether children learn the mechanics of reading and writing than grow to love reading and writing; learn about democracy than have practice in democracy; hear about knowledge… rather than gain experience in personally constructing knowledge… see the world narrowly, simple and ordered, rather than broad complex and uncertain. "Letter to Teachers"
572	
573Louis L’Amour
574
575	Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.
576
577Robert M. Pirsig
578
579	The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the degree and grades is a hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some students do arrive for an education but rote and mechanical nature of the institution soon converts them to a less idealic attitude
580
581Galilei Galileo
582
583	You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself
584	
585Laura Grace Weldon
586
587	Learning of the highest value extends well beyond measurable dimension. It can’t be fit into any curriculum or evaluated by any test. It is activated by experiences which develop our humanity. It teaches us to be our best selves.
588
589Tracy Kidder
590
591	Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room, confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret commission, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it.
592	
593Seth Godin
594
595	Our job is obvious: we need to get out of the way, shine a light, and empower a new generation to teach itself and to go further and faster than any generation ever has.
596
597Sandra Dodd
598	
599	Kids who are in school just visit life sometimes and then they have to stop to do homework or go to sleep early or get to school on time. They’re constantly reminded they are preparing for real life. While being isolated from it.
600
601Christensen, Horn, and Johnson
602	
603	Can the system of schooling designed to process groups of students in standardized ways in a monolithic instructional mode be adapted to handle differences in the way individual brains are wired for learning? "Disrupting Class"
604
605Adele Carroll
606	
607	Forced association is not socialization.
608		
609Michael Dell, CEO
610
611	It’s exciting to see how fast your kids learn and grow. I’m not too worried about them, particularly the ones who like to break rules and don’t follow instructions, those are the ones that will do just fine because they know what’s important to them.
612
613Jean Piaget
614	
615	When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
616	
617	Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... But for me, education means making creators ... You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.
618
619Horace Mann
620
621	A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on cold iron.
622	
623William Glasser
624
625	There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
626	
627Lillian Smith
628	
629	Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school.
630
631Carl Friedrich Gauss
632
633	It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again. The never-satisfied man is so strange; if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.
634	
635Buckminster Fuller
636	
637	None of the world’s problems will have a solution until the world’s individuals become thoroughly self-educated.
638
639Franz Kafka
640	
641	As far as I have seen, at school…they aimed at blotting out one’s individuality.
642
643Alexandre Dumas
644	
645	How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
646
647Gomez Addams
648	
649	Why have kids just to get rid of them? I'm opposed to the whole nonsense.
650	
651George Santayana
652
653	A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
654	
655Henry Adams
656	
657	Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.
658	
659Roland Meighan
660	
661	Nobody grew taller by being measured.
662	
663Warren Buffett
664
665	People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.
666	
667Joseph Chilton Pearce
668	
669	We have a cultural notion that if children were not engineered, if we did not manipulate them, they would grow up as beasts in the field. This is the wildest fallacy in the world.
670	A ‘school-at-home’ approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors.
671	
672Alfie Kohn
673
674	School-at-home homeschooling is taking the worst of school and bringing it home.
675	Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
676	
677Bell Hooks
678	
679	Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.
680	
681Charlotte Mason
682	
683	Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.
684	
685Ludwig von Mises
686	
687	Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
688	
689Claude Monet
690
691	It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water.
692
693Alexander Graham Bell
694
695	You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth.
696	//Hmmm, Familiar institution yet?
697	
698	A man's own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.
699	
700	//i.e. Whether or not he should receive compulsory education/schooling