· 6 years ago · Mar 11, 2019, 05:56 AM
1Stanley Kubrick
2
3 Interest can produce learning in a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a fire cracker.
4
5 //Hmmm, which of these do we use at school?
6
7Thomas Jefferson
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9 There is nothing more unequal than equal treatment of unequal people.
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11 //I think this is relevant to school
12
13James Baldwin
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15 It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
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17 //For if the country was in fact, trustful of the independent mind, it would've trusted us to learn by ourselves.
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19Thomas Moore
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21 One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.
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23 //Precisely
24
25Henry Adams
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27 Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
28
29Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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31 They teach in academics far too many things, and far too much that is useless.
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33 None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
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35 In all the things we learn only from those whom we love.
36
37Peter Gray
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39 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.
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41Sir Walter Scott
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43 All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
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45Mark Twain
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47 I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
48
49George Sampson
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51 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.
52
53Steve Dasbach
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55 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.
56
57 //I am pretty sure we already ended up with that.
58
59Albert Einstein
60
61 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.
62
63
64 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.
65
66 \\ 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.
67
68Wright Brothers
69
70 //No quotes, a bit of a biography
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72 //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. 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.
73
74Nikola Tesla
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76 Every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life energy. I never paid such a price. On the contrary I thrived on my thoughts.
77
78Plato
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80 Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
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82 No traces of slavery ought to mix with the studies of a freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the mind.
83
84 //Compulsory education is morally slavery.
85
86Petronious
87
88 I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
89
90Charles L. Black Jr. "The plight of the captive audience"
91
92 \\He is talking about captive audience in general, not school, but it feels pretty relevant
93
94 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
95
96 ...
97
98 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.
99
100 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.
101
102 ...
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104 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?
105
106 //Only 14 pages, I highly suggest it.
107
108Upton Sinclaire, "The Jungle"
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110 It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
111
112 //i.e. well-meaning schoolteachers
113
114William Orton
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116 If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish into it.
117
118 //Precisely what happens to students at school
119
120Adolf Hitler
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122 Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state.
123
124Mark Twain
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126 Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
127
128 //Not sure about soap.
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130 Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
131
132Oscar Wilde
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134 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.
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136 Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
137
138Winston Churchill
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140 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.
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142 I always like to learn, but I don't always like to be taught.
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144 Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.
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146Helen Todd, "Why Children work", McClure's Magazine, April 1913
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148 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.
149
150George Bernard Shaw
151
152 and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to the turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow-prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: A book from which no human can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.
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154 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.
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156 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.
157
158Martin Luther King
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160 The group consisting of mother, father, and child is the main educational agency of mankind.
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162Henry Ford
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164 Education is pre-eminently a matter of quality, not quantity.
165
166 //Henry Ford was homeschooled.
167
168Charles Babbage
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170 It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that some portion of the neglect of science in England, may be attributed to the system of education we pursue.
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172 A young man passes from public schools to universities almost ignorant of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.
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174Richard Yates
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176 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.
177
178 //And by a long stretch.
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180Finley Peter Dunne
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182 It don't make much difference what you study, so long as you don't like it.
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184 The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
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186Thomas Edison
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188 I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was at the foot of the class.
189
190 //Edison only attended school for a few months.
191
192Henry David Thoreau
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194 What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
195 How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?
196
197Bertrand Russell
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199 Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
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201 Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
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203 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.
204
205 It is because modern education is seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great result.
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207 If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
208
209Benjamin Franklin
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211 He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.
212
213 //Benjamin Franklin was homeschooled.
214
215H. L. Mencken
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217 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.
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219 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.
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221 School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.
222
223Baruch Spinoza
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225 Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
226
227George Saville, Marquis of Hallifax
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229 The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.
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231Joseph Stalin (Hmmm, a supporter of compulsory schooling.)
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233 Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
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235Norman Douglas
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237 Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
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239Paul Karl Feyerabend
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241 The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
242
243Friedrich nietzsche
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245 What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.
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247Theodore Roosevelt
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249 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.
250
251 //Yeah, because of his skyrocketing student loan debt, he may try to steal the whole railroad.
252
253H. H. Munro
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255 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.
256
257Robert Frost
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259 Education is hanging around until you've caught on.
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261Gilbert K. Chesterton
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263 Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.
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265 The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive common people of their common sense.
266
267David Hume
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269 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.
270
271Montesquieu
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273 There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
274
275 //i.e. compulsory education
276
277Thomas Hobbes
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279 It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
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281 Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy
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283 //"Why is this relevant?" Because the logic of the school-mind is that it is better to fill a man's waking hours with school and homework and not at all leisure.
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285Voltaire
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287 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
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289 Common sense is not so common.
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291Aristotle
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293 Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
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295Ralph Waldo Emerson
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297 I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the schoolboys who educate my son.
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299 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.
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301 One of the benefits of college education is to show the boy its little avail.
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303 Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
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305 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.
306
307Alice James
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309 I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am.
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311Helen Beatrix Potter
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313 Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
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315Margaret Mead
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317 My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
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319William Hazlitt
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321 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.
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323Laurence J. Peter
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325 Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
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327Anne Sullivan
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329 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.
330
331
332Alice Duer Miller
333
334 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.
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336Florence King
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338 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.
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340Emma Goldman
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342 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.
343
344Edward M. Forster
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346 Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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348William John Bennett
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350 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.
351
352 //Like Elon Musk.
353John Updike
354
355 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.
356
357 //The founding fathers were not the reason though.
358
359Robert Buzzell
360
361 The mark of a true MBA is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt.
362
363Robert M. Hutchins
364
365 The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
366 The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.
367
368Elbert Hubbard
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370 You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.
371
372Max Leon Forman
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374 Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little as he can for his money.
375
376Phillip K. Dick
377
378 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.
379
380David P. Gardner
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382 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.
383
384Ivan Illich
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386 School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
387 The public school has become the established church of secular society.
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389 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.
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391 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.
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393 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.
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395 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.
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397 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.
398
399 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."
400
401 //See, Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich for the whole.
402
403Marshall McLuhan
404
405 The school system ... is the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.
406
407Michel De Montaigne
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409 We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
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411 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.
412
413Peter Drucker
414
415 When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
416
417C. C. Colton
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419 Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
420
421Paul Simon
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423 When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.
424
425John Dewey
426
427 It is our American habit, if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory, to add another story or a wing.
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429 Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
430
431Paul Graham
432 For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.
433 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.
434 It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.
435 It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life.
436
437Ron Paul
438
439 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.
440
441Max Belz
442
443 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.
444
445John Taylor Gatto
446
447 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
448
449 The Cauldron of Broken Time
450
451 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.
452
453 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.
454
455 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.
456
457 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.
458 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.
459 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".
460 "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.
461 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.
462 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.
463
464Wendell Phillips
465
466 Boredom is, after all, a form of criticism
467
468Mahatma Gandhi
469
470 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.
471
472 One who uses coercion is guilty of deliberate violence. Coercion is inhuman.
473
474 A 'no' uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a 'yes' merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
475
476Carl Rogers
477
478 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.
479 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.
480
481George Orwell
482
483 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.
484
485Count Leo Tolstoy
486
487 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)
488
489Isaac Asimov
490
491 Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
492 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.
493
494Peter Gray
495
496 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.
497
498Leonardo Da Vinci
499
500 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.
501 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.
502
503Anonymous
504
505 If nobody dropped out of eighth grade, who would hire the college graduates?
506 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.
507 The creative person is usually rebellious. He or she is the survivor of a trauma called education.
508 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.
509
510Jacques Ellul
511
512 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.
513
514John Holt
515 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.
516
517 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.
518
519 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.
520
521 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.
522 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.
523
524 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.
525
526 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.
527
528 Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
529
530 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.
531
532 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.
533 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.
534
535 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.
536
537 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.
538
539 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.
540
541Seymour Papert
542
543 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.
544
545 The role of the teacher should be to create the conditions of invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.
546
547 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.
548
549R.D. Laing
550
551 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.
552
553Jules Henry
554
555 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.
556
557Charles Dickens
558
559 I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
560
561 //The logic of the school-mind is to prevent concentration, much less concentration one relevant subject. As John Gatto puts it, "Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance,and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to *prevent* children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior"
562
563 //His emphasis. From John Gatto's "Dumbing us Down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling".
564
565John Stuart Mill
566
567 A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
568
569Herbert Spencer
570
571 For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one.
572
573John Locke
574
575 All mankind... being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.
576
577 What worries you, masters you.
578
579 Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.
580
581Tom Hodgkinson
582
583 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.
584
585Wendy Priesnitz
586
587 Public education reflects our society’s paternalistic, hierarchical worldview, which exploits children in the same way it takes the earth’s resources for granted.
588 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.
589 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.
590 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.
591 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.
592 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.
593
594Noam Chomsky
595
596 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.
597
598 //Weeds them out? That wouldn't be bad. Nay, what they do is far more sinister.
599
600Grace Llewellyn
601
602 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.
603
604 All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.
605
606Jeff Jarvis
607
608 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.
609
610John Ralston Paul
611
612 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 Bastardsâ€
613
614David T Kearns, CEO Xerox
615
616 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.
617
618 //And they don't pay.
619
620Vitto Perrone
621
622 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"
623
624Robert M. Pirsig
625
626 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
627
628Galilei Galileo
629
630 You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
631
632Tracy Kidder
633
634 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.
635
636Seth Godin
637
638 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.
639
640Sandra Dodd
641
642 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.
643
644Christensen, Horn, and Johnson
645
646 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"
647
648Adele Carroll
649
650 Forced association is not socialization.
651
652Michael Dell, CEO
653
654 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.
655
656Minsky
657
658 It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens. Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
659
660Jean Piaget
661
662 When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
663
664 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.
665
666Horace Mann
667
668 A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on cold iron.
669
670William Glasser
671
672 There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
673
674Lillian Smith
675
676 Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school.
677
678Carl Friedrich Gauss
679
680 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.
681
682Buckminster Fuller
683
684 None of the world’s problems will have a solution until the world’s individuals become thoroughly self-educated.
685
686Alexandre Dumas
687
688 How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
689
690Gomez Addams
691
692 Why have kids just to get rid of them? I'm opposed to the whole nonsense.
693
694George Santayana
695
696 A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
697
698Henry Adams
699
700 Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.
701
702Roland Meighan
703
704 Nobody grew taller by being measured.
705
706Warren Buffett
707
708 People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.
709
710Joseph Chilton Pearce
711
712 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.
713 A ‘school-at-home’ approach to homeschooling is just decorating the electric chair in different colors.
714
715Alfie Kohn
716
717 School-at-home homeschooling is taking the worst of school and bringing it home.
718 Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.
719
720Bell Hooks
721
722 Sadly, children’s passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.
723
724Charlotte Mason
725
726 Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.
727
728Ludwig von Mises
729
730 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.
731
732 Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.
733
734Claude Monet
735
736 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.
737
738Alexander Graham Bell
739
740 You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth.
741
742 A man's own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.
743
744 //i.e. Whether or not he should receive compulsory education/schooling.
745
746Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek
747
748 A man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished.
749
750Victor Hugo
751
752 Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
753
754Other people, quoted from John Taylor Gatto "The Underground History of American Education"
755
756 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the new school institution slowly took root after the Civil War in big cities and the defeated South, some of the best minds in the land, people fit by their social rank to comment publicly, spoke out as they watched its first phalanx of graduates take their place in the traditional American world. All these speakers had been trained themselves in the older, a-systematic, noninstitutional schools. At the beginning of another new century, it is eerie to hear what these great-grandfathers of ours had to say about the mass schooling phenomenon as they approached their own fateful new century. In 1867, world-famous American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the London College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming into being:
757
758 School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain. It is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.
759
760 Thirteen years later, Francis Parkman (of Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar judgment. The year was 1880, at the very moment Wundt was founding his laboratory of scientific psychology in Germany:
761
762 Many had hoped that by giving a partial teaching to great numbers of persons,a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far, the results have not equaled expectations. Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have cause to congratulate ourselves. (emphasis added)
763
764 In 1885, the president of Columbia University said:
765
766 The results actually attained under our present system of instruction are neither very flattering nor very encouraging.
767
768 In 1895, the president of Harvard said:
769
770 Ordinary schooling produces dullness. A young man whose intellectual powers are worth cultivating cannot be willing to cultivate them by pursuing phantoms as the schools now insist upon.
771
772 When he said this, compulsion schooling in its first manifestation was approaching its forty-fifth year of operations in Massachusetts, and running at high efficiency in the city of Cambridge, home to Harvard.
773
774 Then, in the early years of the twentieth century, pedagogy underwent another metamorphosis that resulted in an even more efficient scientific form of schooling. Four years before WWI broke out, a well-known European thinker and schoolman, Paul Geheeb, whom Einstein, Hermann Hesse, and Albert Schweitzer all were to claim as a friend, made this commentary on English and German types of forced schooling:
775
776 The dissatisfaction with public schools is widely felt. Countless attempts to reform them have failed. People complain about the "overburdening" of schools; educators argue about which parts of curriculum should be cut; but school cannot be reformed with a pair of scissors. The solution is not to be found in educational institutions. (emphasis added)
777
778 In 1930, the yearly Inglis Lecturer at Harvard made the same case:
779
780 We have absolutely nothing to show for our colossal investment in common schooling after 80 years of trying.
781
782 Thirty years passed before John Gardner’s "Annual Report to the Carnegie Corporation," in 1960,added this:
783
784 Too many young people gain nothing [from school] except the conviction they are misfits.
785
786 //No wonder George Bernard Shaw was so infuriated at the time he spent in school, as I've shown in the quotes.
787
788 The record after 1960 is no different. It is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 have continued into the schools of today. We pay four times more in real dollars than we did in 1930 and thus we buy even more of what mass schooling dollars always bought.
789
790 Vox Populi
791
792 Just under eighteen hundred people wrote letters to me in the year I was New York State Teacher of the Year, in response to a series of essays I wrote about what I had witnessed as a schoolteacher, essays which have now become part of this book. In a strange way, those different letters were eighteen hundred versions of the same letter, a spontaneous outcry against the violation that so many feel in being compelled to be a character in someone else’s fantasy of how to grow up. Listen to a few of these voices:
793
794 Huntington, West Virginia "Homeschooling may be stressful but it’s nothing compared to the stress I experienced watching my daughter’s self-respect and creative energy drain away within the first few weeks of third grade."
795
796 Toronto, Canada "Little has changed since I was asked to sit in straight rows and memorize an irrelevant curriculum. Recently my wife quit her job because we fear losing contact with our children as they enter a school system we cannot understand and are unable to change."
797
798 Frankfurt, Illinois "I had a rich personal inquiry going on in many things. School was for me a tedious interruption of my otherwise interesting life."
799
800 Yelm, Washington "My passion is that my daughter be allowed to grow upbeing completely who she is. Right now she is a happy, enthusiastic, self-taught child of eight and a half. She taught herself to read at four, reads everything.School to me has always felt sick at the core of its concept."
801
802 Madison, Wisconsin "I’m desperate what to do. Three bright and lively children but everyday I see a closing down of enthusiasm as they grind their way through a predetermined school program."
803
804 Reno, Nevada "My wife and I came to the end of the rope with public education four years ago. I was tired of seeing my once happy child constantly in tears."
805
806 Santa Barbara, California "I just took my eight-year-old daughter from school.Bit by bit she was becoming silent, even fearful. From her anxiety to reach the school bus on time to the times she was visibly shaken from criticism of her homework. Day by day she was changing for the worse. But the absolute end was the destructive effect the culture of schoolchildren’s values had on her behavior. Now she laughs again. I have my laughing girl back."
807
808 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania "School started to destroy my family by dividing us from one another instead of joining us. It created separatism among the kids,among the classes, among ages, among parents and children. After I took my second grader from school she began to blossom. She loves her time now, the time is the gift."
809
810 Huntersville, North Carolina "I defined myself as a child by my accomplishments at school just as I had been taught to. I was a National MeritScholar and a Presidential Scholar but I couldn’t even make it through two years of college because my own authoritarian schooling had left me completely unprepared to make my own decisions."
811
812 St. Louis, Missouri "Mr. Gatto, you are describing my daughter when you name the pathological symptoms our children display as a result of their schooling. And you are describing me—which pains me almost unbearably to recognize and admit."
813
814 //The series of essays are in John Taylor Gatto's book, "Dumbing Us Down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling". Also they are easy to find online.
815
816 Haverhill, Massachusetts "I have no certificates of great accomplishment, no titles, no diploma except a high school one, no degree except when I have a fever. Yet I do have experience gained while raising three daughters. I’d like to paint a picture for you. I had to take my daughter out of kindergarten after five weeks. This happy, self-regulating child I was raising showed great signs of stress in that short of a time. I remembered the rebellion of my two angry teenagers, suddenly made the connection, and took her from school. And so the last girl I raised as a free child. There have been no signs of anger or rebellion since then. That was seventeen years ago."
817
818 ...
819
820 Another prominent Harvard professor, Robert Ulich, wrote in his own book, Philosophy of Education (1961): "[We are producing] more and more people who will be dissatisfied because the artificially prolonged time of formal schooling will arouse in them hopes which society cannot fulfill.... These men and women will form the avant-garde of the disgruntled. It is no exaggeration to say [people like these] were responsible for World War II." Although Ulich is parroting Toynbee here, whose Study of History was a standard reference of speculative history for decades, the idea that serious intellectual schooling of a universal nature would be a sword pointed at the established order, has been an idea common in the West since at least the Tudors,and one openly discussed from 1890 onwards.
821
822 Thus I was less surprised than I might have been to open Walter Kotschnig’s Unemployment in the Learned Professions (1937), which I purchased for fifty cents off a blanket on the street in front of Columbia University from a college graduate down on his luck, to find myself listening to an argument attributing the rise of Nazism directly to the expansion of German university enrollment after WWI. For Germany, this had been a short-term solution to postwar unemployment, like the G.I. Bill, but according to Kotschnig, the policy created a mob of well-educated people with a chip on their shoulder because there was no work—a situation which led swiftly downhill for the Weimar republic.
823
824 A whole new way to look at schooling from this management perspective emerges, a perspective which is the furthest thing from cynical. Of course there are implications for our contemporary situation. Much of our own 50 to 60 percent post-secondary college enrollment should be seen as a temporary solution to the otherwise awesome reality that two-thirds of all work in the UnitedStates is now part-time or short-term employment. In a highly centralized corporate workplace that’s becoming ever more so with no end in sight, all jobs are sucked like debris in a tornado into four hierarchical funnels of vast proportions: corporate, governmental, institutional, and professional. Once work is preempted in this monopoly fashion, fear of too many smart people is legitimate, hard to exaggerate. If you let people learn too much, they might kill you. Or so history and Senator Aldrich would have us believe.
825
826 Once privy to ideas like those entertained by Inglis, Conant, Ulich, and Kotschnig, most contemporary public school debate becomes nonsense. If we do not address philosophies and policies which sentence the largest portion of our people to lives devoid of meaning, then we might be better off not discussing school at all. A Trilateral Commission Report of 1974, Crisis of Democracy, offered with some urgency this advice: "A program is necessary to lower the job expectations of those who receive a college education." (emphasis added) During the quarter-century separating this managerial proposition from the Millennium, such a program was launched—for reasons we now turn to the historian Arnold Toynbee to illuminate.
827
828 ...
829
830 \\earlier in the book
831
832 Older American forms of schooling would never have been equal to the responsibility coal, steam,steel, and machinery laid upon them. As late as 1890, the duration of the average school year was twelve to twenty weeks. Even with that, school attendance hovered between 26 and 42 percent nationwide with the higher figure only in a few places like Salem, Massachusetts.
833
834 ... \\earlier
835
836 William Torrey Harris
837
838 If you have a hard time believing that this revolution in the contract ordinary Americans had with their political state was intentionally provoked, it’s time for you to meet William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906. No one, other than Cubberley, who rose out of the ranks of professional pedagogues ever had as much influence as Harris. Harris both standardized and Germanized our schools. Listen to his voice from The Philosophy of Education,published in 1906:
839
840 Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
841
842 –The Philosphy of Education (1906)
843
844Walter Lippman, speaking before the Association for the Advancement of Science, December 29, 1940
845
846 The thesis I venture to submit to you is as follows: That during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state; That the schools and colleges have, therefore,been sending out into the world men who no longer understand the creative principle of the society in which they must live; That deprived of their cultural tradition, the newly educated Western men no longer possess in the form and substance of their own minds and spirits and ideas, the premises, the rationale, the logic, the method, the values of the deposited wisdom which are the genius of the development of Western civilization; That the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization and is in fact destroying it. I realize quite well that this thesis constitutes a sweeping indictment of modern education.
847
848 //Seems consistent with Charles Babbage. But as I've consistently shown in other quotes, it is a mistake to think that compulsory education would succeed just by changing curriculum.
849
850 But I believe the indictment is justified and here is a prima facie case for entering this indictment.
851
852Jacques Lusseyran
853
854 ...there is such a thing as moral odor and that was the case at school. A group of human beings that stay in one room by compulsion begins to smell. That is literally the case, and with children it happens even faster. Just think how much suppressed anger, humiliated independence, frustrated vagrancy and impotent curiosity can be accumulated by boys between the ages of ten and fourteen ...