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EDUCATION - THINK ABOUT IT

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“I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.”

- John Taylor Gatto


"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)

"One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make is who will educate your children.

Education is not just learning to read but learning what to think about what you read and how to choose worthwhile reading material. It’s about learning to discern truth and falsehood in what you read.

Education is not just learning the facts of science but learning why they matter and how to apply them ethically.

Education is not just learning dates and events from history but learning to apply the lessons of lives well lived and lives poorly lived — and how to tell the difference.

Who will teach your children the meaning behind the facts?"
- Tammy Drennan

"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)

"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
- Sir Walter Scott

"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers."
- Thomas Hodgskin, 1823

"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child."
–George Bernard Shaw

"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”

"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

"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 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 children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be 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

"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

"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

"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 (Author)

"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality."
- Beatrix Potter (Author of the Peter Rabbit books)

"Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction."
- Anne Sullivan, Tutor to Helen Keller

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on 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 builds a stone wall with his wooden blocks, 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 experiences."
- Anne Sullivan, Tutor to Helen Keller

"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

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
- George Santayana

"We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists…. We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists."
- Communist Party Education Workers Congress (1918)

"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

"Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them then to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. Such a tyranny, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past, which despite their weapons of fire and sword permitted thought at least to be free. The truth is that the materialistic paternalism of the present day, if allowed to go on unchecked, will rapidly make of America one huge “Main Street,” where spiritual adventure will be discouraged and democracy will be regarded as consisting in the reduction of all mankind to the proportions of the narrowest and least gifted of the citizens. God grant that there may come a reaction, and that the great principles of Anglo-Saxon liberty may be rediscovered before it is too late!"

- J. Gresham Machen (1923)

"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

"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

The schools ain’t what they used to be, and never was.
- Will Rogers

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

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
- Albert Einstein

"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."
- Vladimir Lenin

"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

"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion."
- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
- Joseph Stalin

"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

"The millions of dollars which we devote every year to high-school education are, for the most part, money spent for the retarding of intelligence, the discouragement of efficiency, the stunting of character."
- Bernard Iddings Bell (1949)

"What borders on the criminal is the poor teaching and neglect of those subjects that deal with the history of ideas and ideals, a knowledge of which is essential to all youth who would assume their place in society as thinking, feeling human beings."
- Mortimer Smith (1949)

"Experts talk constantly of training for leadership, but their whole system is one of conditioning for servitude. This is disastrous to the well-being of democracy which depends for safety on the free development of the highest qualities of gifted individuals….For all his talk of democracy, the educator is generally authoritarian and dogmatic. Teacher-training institutions in general exist to indoctrinate; their task is not to discover truth, but to convey ‘the truth.’"
- Hilda Neatby

"Dewey, more than any other single person, must be held responsible for the intellectual, cultural and moral poverty of much modern teaching."
- Hilda Neatby

"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
- Isabel Paterson

"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

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