Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Education -- compulsory schooling, compulsory learning -- is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can."

~ John Holt  

"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  

"Consider compulsory school-attendance laws, for instance. They fill government schools with children who don't want to be there. Some students are violent, attacking -- and even killing -- teachers and other students. Teachers must lock their classrooms to keep hoodlums at bay in the hallways. Thus, compulsory attendance laws, alleged to promote education, can make it almost impossible."

~ Marisa Manley  

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."

~ Helen Keller  

"Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure."

~ Kingman Brewster  

"The intellectually stifling results of censorship -- while deplorable in any setting -- would be all the more abominable if allowed to exist within the college environment."

~ William M. Anderson, Jr.  

It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, 'A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks,' even though in today's government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day.

~ Dr. Lawrence W. Reed  

"Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control."

~ Jack Hugh  

"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

~ James Madison  

"Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another."

~ Oscar Wilde  

"I think the world is run by 'C' students."

~ Al McGuire  

"It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It's a bureaucratic system where everybody's role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's not a surprise when a school system doesn't improve. It more resembles a Communist economy than our own market economy."

~ Albert Shanker  

"I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses."

~ Davy Crockett  

"Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more."

~ Francisco Ferrer  

"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