DONE 12-Apr-08
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
-- Plato
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
-- Cicero
The desire to know is natural to good men.
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?"
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Anyone who argues by referring to authority is not using his mind but rather his memory.
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
-- Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
-- Late sixteenth century proverb
Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life.
-- Goethe
Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
-- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
-- John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756
Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.
-- Benjamin Rush
A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance...as a comet or an earthquake.
-- John Adams, 1765
Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-- William Pitt, 1783
Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
-- John Adams, Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which grant[s] a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
-- James Madision, 1794
I believe there are more instances of abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
-- James Madison
It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.
-- Thomas Jefferson
A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.
-- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-- George Washington
Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.
-- Thomas Hodgskin, 1823
The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.
-- Charles Darwin
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.
-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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.
-- Herbert Spencer, 1850
The philosophy in the classroom of this generation is the philosophy of government in the next". -- Abraham Lincoln
I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves.
-- Harriet Tubman
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
-- Lord Chesterfield
Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions.
-- William Godwin
[T]he child should be taught to consider his instructor...superior to the parent in point of authority.... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous.... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher.
-- John Swett, Superintendent of California Public School System (1860s)
Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
-- Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1874)
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
-- William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889
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.
-- F W Nietzsche (1889)
I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the indian...we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.
-- Chief Joseph, Nez Perce
We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.
-- From the Democratic National Platform of 1892 (in opposition to compulsory attendance laws)
The secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society ... [T]he result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.
-- Lester Frank Ward 1897
We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.
-- Horace Mann, first secretary of education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
[The children's] parents know not how to instruct them.... The state, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts trained to virtue.
-- Archibald D. Murphey, founder of the North Carolina public schools
The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.
-- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
The teacher is engaged not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.... In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
-- John Dewey, American educator
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
-- John Dewey, American educator
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
-- Rudyard Kipling
The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
-- George Bernard Shaw
My schooling not only failed to teach me 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.
-- George Bernard Shaw
A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Freedom requires responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-- Mark Twain
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-- Mark Twain
Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
-- Mark Twain
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
-- Ellwood P. Cubberley, Dean of the Stanford University School of Education
In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply.
The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
-- John D. Rockefeller General Education Board (1906)
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
-- Eric Hoffer
That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. 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.
-- H.L. Mencken
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.
-- H.L. Mencken
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
-- Agatha Christie
I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
-- Carl Rogers
Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
-- Lillian Smith
Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.
-- Robert M. Hutchins
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
-- Albert Edward Wiggin
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial.
-- Justice Louis Brandeis
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.
-- Ludwig von Mises
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.
-- Bertrand Russell
Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
-- Bertrand Russell
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
-- Aldous Huxley, forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still posses.
--C.S. Lewis
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C.S. Lewis
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
-- Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
-- Margaret Mead
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
-- Vladimir Lenin
It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission, and welds them into unity.
-- Benito Mussolini, "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932
At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.
-- Benito Mussolini
Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
--Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education (from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935)
Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-- Joseph Stalin
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
-- F. A. Hayek
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.
-- Winston Churchill
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
--William Glasser
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he'll pick himself up and continue on.
-- Winston Churchill
The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control.
-- Frank Chodorov, "Why Free Schools Are Not Free," Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov
Freedom is Slavery
-- 1984 (George Orwell)
Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
-- Isabel Paterson
A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
-- Isabel Paterson
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
-- Isabel Paterson
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
-- Eric Hoffer
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
-- Eric Hoffer
To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
-- e.e. cummings
Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?
-- Royce Van Norman, "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47(1966):315-16
The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.
-- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr
Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive.
-- Carolyn Lochhead
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.
-- Max Victor Belz
"Parent choice'' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice'' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants'' of a single family rather than the "needs'' of society.
-- Association of California School Administrators
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.
-- Jack Hugh
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
-- Milton Friedman - Economist and 1976 Nobel Laureate
The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - "state indoctrination."
-- Jonathan Kozol
Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
-- Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
-- Ivan Illich
It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society.
-- John Holt
People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help.
-- John Holt
No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
-- John Holt
Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.
-- Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
-- Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place an education.
-- Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian
Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable.
-- Pope John Paul II
When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
-- Albert Shanker (Former President of the American Federation of Teachers)
It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.
-- Albert Shanker
In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.
-- Marshall Fritz (Founder, The Alliance for the Separation of School & State)
Some want prayer in school, some want condoms. Printing prayers on condoms satisfies nobody.
-- Marshall Fritz
Charter schools are just public schools on a slightly longer leash. A dog on a long leash is still a dog on a leash.
-- Marshall Fritz
As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.
-- Jerry Brown (Mayor, Oakland, California)
Today's Democratic Party knows our children's education is not complete unless they learn good values. We applaud the efforts of the Clinton-Gore Administration to promote character education in our schools. Teaching good values, strong character, and the responsibilities of citizenship must be an essential part of American education.
-- Democratic Party Platform, 1996 [what a difference 100 or so years can make: The Democratic Party went from "opposition to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" and a "fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government," to the position that government schools should shape our values, guide our character, and teach us our responsibilities as citizens.]
If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet?
-- Cat Farmer
A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
-- Walter Bagehot
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
--Eric Hoffer
Nothing enrages 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.
-- Seymour Papert
There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.
-- William Damon, Stanford University Center on Adolescence
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents....
-- John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, The Underground History of American Education
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
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.
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
-- John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience..
-- National Education Association Resolution (2003)
The present homeschooling laws are, at best, a poor compromise between a highly structured, two hundred billion dollar a year industry and the principles and beliefs of a handful of parents.
-- Helen Hegener, The Homeschool Reader
Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary.
-- Helen Hegener, Alternatives in Education
Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?
-- Stephen Arons, Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling
Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
--Norman Mailer
The public expects too much from teachers because educationists have led it to believe teachers could be substitute parents, psychotherapists, cops, social workers, dieticians, nursemaids, babysitters, and nose wipers and still do a decent job teaching kids to read, write, and do math. Instead of saying no, educationists have added courses in environmental education, death education, personal hygiene, self-esteem, driver's ed, job readiness, sexual harassment, radon studies, yoga, yogurt awareness, and go-knows-what-else.
-- Charles Sykes, Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add
A family member asked my wife, "Aren't you concerned about his (our son's) socialization with other kids?" My wife gave this response: "Go to your local middle school, junior high, or high school, walk down the hallways, and tell me which behavior you see that you think our son should emulate."
-- Manfred B. Zysk
In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.
-- Joseph Sobran
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P.J. O'Rourke
Education is unique among consumer products -- when it fails to work as advertised, it's the customer that gets labelled as defective.
-- Kevin Killion
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.
-- Steve Dasbach
If we keep on the way we're going, we're going to wind up where we're headed.
-- Anonymous
The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.
-- Linda Bowles
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
-- Paul Johnson
If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.
-- James R. Otteson
Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.
-- Sheldon Richmon
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
-- Thomas Sowell
The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others.
-- Thomas Sowell
Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
-- Thomas Sowell
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
-- Thomas Sowell
Think! It ain't illegal yet.
-- George Clinton
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.//%Author%Plato//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.//%Author%Cicero//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The desire to know is natural to good men.//%Author%Leonardo da Vinci//%Who%(1452-1519)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?"//%Author%Leonardo da Vinci//%Who%(1452-1519)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Anyone who argues by referring to authority is not using his mind but rather his memory.//%Author%Leonardo da Vinci//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.//%Author%Leonardo da Vinci//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The road to hell is paved with good intentions.//%Author%Late 16th Century Proverb//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life.//%Author%Goethe//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.//%Author%Baruch Spinoza//%Who%(1632-1677)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.//%Author%John Adams//%Source%Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.//%Author%Benjamin Rush//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance...as a comet or an earthquake.//%Author%John Adams//%Source%1765//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.//%Author%Benjamin Franklin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.//%Author%Benjamin Franklin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.//%Author%William Pitt//%Source%1783//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.//%Author%John Adams//%Source%Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I believe there are more instances of abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.//%Author%James Madison/%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.//%Author%Thomas Jefferson//%Source%First Inaugural Address//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.//%Author%Thomas Jefferson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.//%Author%George Washington//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.//%Author%Thomas Hodgskin//%Source%1823//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.//%Author%Charles Darwin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%John Stuart Mill//%Source%On Liberty//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%Herbert Spencer//%Source%1850//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The philosophy in the classroom of this generation is the philosophy of government in the next".//%Author%Abraham Lincoln//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves.//%Author%Harriet Tubman//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.//%Author%Lord Chesterfield//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions.//%Author%William Godwin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%[T]he child should be taught to consider his instructor...superior to the parent in point of authority.... The vulgar impression that parents have a legal right to dictate to teachers is entirely erroneous.... Parents have no remedy as against the teacher.//%Author%John Swett//%Who%Superintendent of California Public School System (1860s)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.//%Author%Benjamin Disraeli//%Source%(1874)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.//%Author%William T. Harris//%Who%U.S. Commissioner of Education//%Source%1889//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%F W Nietzsche//%Source%(1889)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the indian...we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.//%Author%Chief Joseph//%Who%Nez Perce//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.//%Author%Democratic National Platform of 1892//%Source%(in opposition to compulsory attendance laws)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society ... [T]he result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.//%Author%Lester Frank Ward//%Source%1897//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.//%Author%Horace Mann//%Who%first secretary of education in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%[The children's] parents know not how to instruct them.... The state, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts trained to virtue.//%Author%Archibald D. Murphey//%Who%founder of the North Carolina public schools//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.//%Author%Karl Marx//%Source%The Communist Manifesto//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The teacher is engaged not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.... In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.//%Author%John Dewey//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.//%Author%John Dewey//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.//%Author%Rudyard Kipling//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.//%Author%George Bernard Shaw//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%My schooling not only failed to teach me 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.//%Author%George Bernard Shaw//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.//%Author%George Bernard Shaw//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.//%Author%Ralph Waldo Emerson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.//%Author%Mark Twain//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.//%Author%Mark Twain//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.//%Author%Mark Twain//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.//%Author%Ellwood P. Cubberley//%Who%Dean of the Stanford University School of Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.//%Author%Eric Hoffer//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. 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.//%Author%H.L. Mencken//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.//%Author%H.L. Mencken//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.//%Author%Agatha Christie//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.//%Author%Carl Rogers//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.//%Author%Lillian Smith//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.//%Author%Robert M. Hutchins//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.//%Author%Albert Edward Wiggin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial.//%Author%Justice Louis Brandeis//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%Ludwig von Mises//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%Bertrand Russell//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.//%Author%Bertrand Russell//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.//%Author%Aldous Huxley//%Source%forward to Brave New World, 1946 edition//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still posses.//%Author%C.S. Lewis//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.//%Author%C.S. Lewis//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.//%Author%Margaret Mead//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.//%Author%Margaret Mead//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.//%Author%Vladimir Lenin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission, and welds them into unity.//%Author%Benito Mussolini//%Source%"The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.//%Author%Benito Mussolini//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.//%Author%Bernhard Rust//%Who%Nazi Minister of Education//%Source%from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.//%Author%Joseph Stalin//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.//%Author%F. A. Hayek//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%Winston Churchill//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.//%Author%William Glasser//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control.//%Author%Frank Chodorov//%Source%"Why Free Schools Are Not Free," Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Freedom is Slavery//%Author%George Orwell//%Source%1984//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?//%Author%Isabel Paterson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.//%Author%Isabel Paterson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.//%Author%Isabel Paterson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.//%Author%Eric Hoffer//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.//%Author%Eric Hoffer//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.//%Author%e.e. cummings//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?//%Author%Royce Van Norman//%Source%"School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47(1966):315-16//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.//%Author%Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of of difficult changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive.//%Author%Carolyn Lochhead//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%Max Victor Belz//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%"Parent choice'' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice'' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants'' of a single family rather than the "needs'' of society.//%Author%Association of California School Administrators//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.//%Author%Jack Hugh//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.//%Author%John Kenneth Galbraith//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.//%Author%Milton Friedman//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.' //%Author%Jonathan Kozol//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.//%Author%Ivan Illich//%Source%Deschooling Society//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.//%Author%Ivan Illich//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society, but to make society.//%Author%John Holt//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help.//%Author%John Holt//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.//%Author%John Holt//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.//%Author%Richard Mitchell//%Source%The Underground Grammarian//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.//%Author%Richard Mitchell//%Source%The Underground Grammarian//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education.//%Author%Richard Mitchell//%Source%The Underground Grammarian//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable.//%Author%Pope John Paul II//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.//%Author%Albert Shanker//%Who%Former President of the American Federation of Teachers//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.//%Author%Albert Shanker//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.//%Author%Marshall Fritz//%Who%Founder, The Alliance for the Separation of School & State//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Some want prayer in school, some want condoms. Printing prayers on condoms satisfies nobody.//%Author%Marshall Fritz//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Charter schools are just public schools on a slightly longer leash. A dog on a long leash is still a dog on a leash.//%Author%Marshall Fritz//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.//%Author%Jerry Brown//%Who%Mayor, Oakland, California//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Today's Democratic Party knows our children's education is not complete unless they learn good values. We applaud the efforts of the Clinton-Gore Administration to promote character education in our schools. Teaching good values, strong character, and the responsibilities of citizenship must be an essential part of American education.//%Author%Democratic Party Platform, 1996//%Source%[what a difference 100 or so years can make: The Democratic Party went from "opposition to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children" and a "fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government," to the position that government schools should shape our values, guide our character, and teach us our responsibilities as citizens.]//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet?//%Author%Cat Farmer//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.//%Author%Walter Bagehot//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.//%Author%Eric Hoffer//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Nothing enrages 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.//%Author%Seymour Papert//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.//%Author%William Damon//%Source%Stanford University Center on Adolescence//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents....//%Author%John Taylor Gatto//%Who%New York State Teacher of the Year//%Source%The Underground History of American Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.//%Author%John Taylor Gatto//%Source%The Underground History of American Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.//%Author%John Taylor Gatto//%Source%The Underground History of American Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%John Taylor Gatto//%Source%The Underground History of American Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.//%Author%John Taylor Gatto//%Source%The Underground History of American Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.//%Author%National Education Association Resolution//%Source%(2003)//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%
The present homeschooling laws are, at best, a poor compromise between a highly structured, two hundred billion dollar a year industry and the principles and beliefs of a handful of parents.//%Author%Helen Hegener//%Source%The Homeschool Reader//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary.//%Author%Helen Hegener//%Source%Alternatives in Education//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?//%Author%Stephen Arons//%Source%Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.//%Author%Norman Mailer//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The public expects too much from teachers because educationists have led it to believe teachers could be substitute parents, psychotherapists, cops, social workers, dieticians, nursemaids, babysitters, and nose wipers and still do a decent job teaching kids to read, write, and do math. Instead of saying no, educationists have added courses in environmental education, death education, personal hygiene, self-esteem, driver's ed, job readiness, sexual harassment, radon studies, yoga, yogurt awareness, and god-knows-what-else.//%Author%Charles Sykes//%Source%Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%A family member asked my wife, "Aren't you concerned about his (our son's) socialization with other kids?" My wife gave this response: "Go to your local middle school, junior high, or high school, walk down the hallways, and tell me which behavior you see that you think our son should emulate."//%Author%Manfred B. Zysk//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.//%Author%Joseph Sobran//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Education is unique among consumer products -- when it fails to work as advertised, it's the customer that gets labelled as defective.//%Author%Kevin Killion//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%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.//%Author%Steve Dasbach//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%If we keep on the way we're going, we're going to wind up where we're headed.//%Author%Unknown//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.//%Author%Linda Bowles//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.//%Author%Paul Johnson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.//%Author%James R. Otteson//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.//%Author%Sheldon Richmon//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.//%Author%Thomas Sowell//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others.//%Author%Thomas Sowell//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.//%Author%Thomas Sowell//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?//%Author%Thomas Sowell//%end%
%start%%cat=Education//%quote%Think! It ain't illegal 'yet.'//%Author%George Clinton//%end%
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