gsvol
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I Quit, I Think - John Taylor Gatto
How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why - The Natural Child Project
The Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto
H.L. Mecken
"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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States......"
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein
"You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? "
Albert Einstein
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Samuel Butler
"Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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."
Anatole France
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't."
G.K. Chesterton
"As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly."
Theodore Roosevelt
"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society."
John W. Gardner
"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."
Paul E. Gray
"The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education."
Victor Hugo
"Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education."
Aristotle
"All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth."
Diogenes
"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
Plato
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child."
R.S. Ingersoll
"Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed."
John F. Kennedy
"Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain."
John Lubbock
"Here are three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer: Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought to help us to answer these questions."
Groucho Marx
"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."
Doris Lessing
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
Doris Lessing
"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."
Doris Lessing
"Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born."
Doris Lessing
"As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture."
Sir Walter Scott
"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
William Butler Yeats
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why - The Natural Child Project
The Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto
H.L. Mecken
"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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States......"
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
Karl Arbeiter: former teacher of Albert Einstein
"You're aware the boy failed my grade school math class, I take it? And not that many years later he's teaching college. Now I ask you: Is that the sorriest indictment of the American educational system you ever heard? "
Albert Einstein
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Samuel Butler
"Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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."
Anatole France
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't."
G.K. Chesterton
"As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly."
Theodore Roosevelt
"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society."
John W. Gardner
"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."
Paul E. Gray
"The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education."
Victor Hugo
"Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education."
Aristotle
"All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth."
Diogenes
"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
Plato
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child."
R.S. Ingersoll
"Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed."
John F. Kennedy
"Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain."
John Lubbock
"Here are three great questions which in life we have over and over again to answer: Is it right or wrong? Is it true or false? Is it beautiful or ugly? Our education ought to help us to answer these questions."
Groucho Marx
"I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book."
Doris Lessing
"Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."
Doris Lessing
"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."
Doris Lessing
"Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born."
Doris Lessing
"As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture."
Sir Walter Scott
"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
William Butler Yeats
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
