EducationQuotes

QUOTATIONS

It was the freewheeling seventies, and our family had chosen to live without a television. People began talking about our new "lifestyle." Funny --- I thought of it as a life, rich in friends and careers, brimming with garden-grown food and home-baked bread and the sounds of singing around the piano. The ultimate accusation came from our pastor's wife, who said, "How dare you try to protect your children from reality?" Kathleen Wendland, Sun Magazine

Timothy Kerchmar is a bright young man.

Last year, he was a member of my "home-school" Spanish class.

This year, Tim decided to attend public school, and enrolled as a sophomore at Orange High School in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Several days ago -- 8 months into the current school year -- Tim visited me to show off his new car, the first he's ever owned.

Looking back on his experience at Orange, Tim said: "I was disoriented for the first few weeks. But I've made lots of friends. Almost from the beginning I was invited to eat lunch at a table with really smart seniors. But you know what? I don't think Public School helps you with social skills like people say. Public School teaches you how to be defensive and aggressive."

The news of the day is a figment of our technological imagination.... Without a medium to create its form, the news of the day does not exist.... We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology, are given form by television, not by the printed word.... Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

Neil Postman and "The Disappearance of Childhood" http://alanarchibald.homestead.com/DisappearanceofChildhood.html

"Childhood Shorter, with Less Free Play Time" http://www.naplesnews.com/today/editorial/a36250l.htm

Compulsory government schooling -- while pretending to protect children from child labor -- IS child labor. America's relentless pursuit of productivity -- and the ongoing techno-cultural acceleration that give rise to it -- are destructive of individuals and environments. Monetary measures of productivity rise in direct relationship to personal, social and planetary despoliation. To continue this systematic degradation, it is necessary to disdain the inherent restraints of Dharma, --- forfending, at any cost, the possibility of awakening. We have made an unconsicous decision to remain sightless rather than be blinded by the light. Alan Archibald

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

George George Bernard Shaw

4.3% of ninth graders make suicide attempts serious enough to require medical treatment. (That's 1 in 23 American fourteen year olds.)

"There's a lot of anger in my generation. You can hear it in the music. Kid s are angry for a lot of reasons, but mostly because parents aren't around." Robertino Rodriguez, age 17, Newsweek cover story, May 8, 2000 (Parents are too busy -- achieving and producing -- to be present to their children. "The busy-ness of America is busy-ness.")

If you mess up raising your kids, it doesn't much matter what else you do well. Jackie Kennedy Onassis

It is not enough to do what's "right." We must do what's right, rightly. Typically, this means producing less and contemplating more --- growing mindful of Being while detaching ourselves from compulsive Doing. Meditation, contemplation and mindfulness/prayerfulness help us undo the self-destructive frenzy of misguided accomplishment. Archibald

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves. G. K. Chesterton, Toronto, 1930

Walking

Henry David Thoreau

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of a society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee and everyone of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who undesrtood the art of Walking, that is of taking walks, - who had a genius, so to speak for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte-Terrer, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all of the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit within us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, but we are faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round-again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, - prepared to send back our hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friend, and never see them again, - if you have paid all your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.

The English word "school" derives from the Greek word "schole" meaning "leisure."

The urge to keep kids "on task" reduces most teachers to Gradgrind task-masters. The tunnel vision that typifies the modern mind arises from the normalization of task orientation. Although we do not wish to cultivate people who are utterly aimless, the true aim of education is to see things whole, not as a series of segmented tasks whose aggregate is always less than the sum of its parts.

Instruction derives from the Latin words "in struire" -- "to assemble" or "build into."

Alternatively, "education" derives from the words "ex ducare" meaning "to lead out of."

Instruction focuses on those skills that enable individuals to make their own living, to make their self-centered way in the world.

Education cultivates an outlook focused on the res publica, The Common Good, the divinely-ordained need that everyone "have a life," or, alternatively, slide into meaninglessness, despair, or the distraction of acquisition.

"My education plan invests in smaller schools and smaller classes --- because we know that is one of the most effective ways to improve student performance." Al Gore

FACT: Pupil-teacher ratios have been shrinking for a century. In 1955 pupil-teacher ratios in public elementary schools were 30.2-to-one and 20.9-to-one respectively. In 1998 they were 18.9-to-one and 14.7-to-one. We have simultaneously witnessed declining pupil-teacher ratios and declining measures of cognitive outcomes.

I attended St. Thomas the Apostle School in Irondequoit, New York, from 1952-1960. Throughout those years, my class size ranged from 45 to 55 students. Classes were orderly. A pervasive atmosphere of honor and love was continuously palpable. My fourth grade teacher Sister Theodosa (c. 1956) was 94 years old and a childhood friend of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Unimpeded learning took place in fluid fashion. I graduated to Aquinas Institute in Rochester, New York, already "in love with learning" and instilled with an abiding sense of academic rigor. (St. Thomas was operated by Mercy Sisters, and Aquinas Institute by Basilian Priests.) Alan Archibald

Washington D.C. public schools spend over $11,000.00 (eleven thousand dollars) per student per year.

Average tuition paid at American Catholic Elementary Schools is less than $3000.00 per year.

In 1999, ten of Camden, New Jersey's twenty two elementary schools produced no fourth graders who could read at "grade level."

It used to be that the psychological disasters didn't show up until the fourth or fifth grade. In the last couple of years that's changed. Now we see huge numbers of kids coming into kindergarten already in shambles.

Janet Archibald. 30 year veteran school teacher

Lincoln School #22

Rochester, New York

Comment, Spring, 2000

"We're seeing more abuse than ever before. It's unbelievable. I don't want to be around for what's coming up. Columbine? Columbine was just the beginning." Charlie Edwards, a psychologist who coordinates special services for six school districts in rural Indiana south of Indianapolis. Charlie's districts are 99% "white." Comment made 7/01/00

Everyone is complicit in trying to make the education system look good without merit... This country is so content not to know the truth about its children, it's horrifying.

Lisa Graham Keegan

Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction

On education

School is the Army for kids. Adults make them go there, and when they get there, adults tell them what to do, bribe and threaten them into doing it, and punish them when they don't. John Holt

Schools have not necessarily much to do with education ... they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be instilled in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school. Winston Churchill

Obedient children go willingly to the trenches. Arthur Acton

Whatever their claims, schools are training most young people to be habitually subservient. Chris Shute

People must be educated once more to know their place. Ministry of Education official responsible for National Curriculum Planning in the United Kingdom

It used to worry me that, as a teacher, I was engaged in what was essentially microscopic fascism. Chris Shute

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons... are prohibited. Tolstoy

A school, like a fascist state, is about the business of compelling people to conform to a pattern of behaviour and a way of thinking decided by the few who hold power over them. Chris Shute

It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them. Adolf Hitler

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know. John Taylor Gatto

Schools learned long ago that the way to keep children from thinking is to keep them busy. Everett Reimer

(Educators speak reflexively about "keeping children on task." Traditionally taskmasters have been viewed as tyrants. "The business of America is business." Like "progress," this "busyness" may have been good "once upon a time," but now it has gone on too long. The Greek root of "school" is "schole" meaning "leisure." As Chesterton put it: "The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground." The dividing line between taskmasters and slave-drivers is negligible. How appropriate that the pedagogues of ancient Greece were slaves.)

No teacher ever said: 'Don't value uncertainty and tentativeness, don't question questions, above all don't think!' The message is communicated quietly, insidiously, relentlessly and efficiently through the structure of the classroom: through the role of the teacher, the role of the student ... the 'doings' that are praised or censured. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

School is necessary to produce the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society. Ivan Illich

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things. Plato

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

When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all. Paul Simon

Bertrand Russell's grandmother decided to homeschool the boy saying: 'I will not send him off to be bullied and buggered.'

Public schoolboys, whatever their particular school ... had a language of their own ... ways and attitudes which they took for granted but which were foreign to me: for instance their acceptance of sodomy as more or less normal behaviour. Malcolm Muggeridge (Although Muggeridge's comment doesn't correspond to American norms, it recalls the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church.)

My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school. Margaret Mead

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.

John Taylor Gatto

We no longer have to force-feed education to children: they live in a world in which they are surrounded by educative resources. There are several million books in public libraries. There are museums in every town. There is a constant flow of cheap or free information from a dozen media. There are home computers which are easily connected to phones and thus other computers...There are thousands of workplaces... There are... the old, the disabled, the very young all in need of children in their lives, all in need of the kind of help caring and careful youngsters can give, and all of them enriched sources of information about the world, and freely available to any child who isn't locked away in school. Richard North

The justification for school in its present form no longer exists. Philip Toogood

No one had the guts to leave the temple. Pete Townsend

Deep in my bones I remain convinced that ultimately it will be the de-schoolers who are proved right, and that far in the future our descendants will view the whole concept of the school with mirth and disbelief. Gerald Haigh

Many parents I know put more hours into their golf games, or their wardrobes, or into accumulating enough capital for the purchase of unnecessary luxuries, than into their child's education. Because they are still children themselves, it simply does not occur to them to take an active role in their children's learning. David Guterson

Home-schoolers as a rule have no quarrel with teachers. My own parents are both teachers; I've seen a lot of work that teachers do, on their own time and out of their own pockets. Our reservations are about the system of schooling~. not the people who are doing their best within it. British Columbia home-schooler

Thousands of caring, humane people work in schools, as teachers, and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell. John Taylor Gatto

Some true educational experiences are bound to occur in schools. They occur, however, despite and not because of school. Everett Reimer

From my earliest memories of school (going back some 60 years) right up to the present, I am struck by how recurrent are the standard complaints and how little things change. Students are still locked into classrooms, still chained to desks, still herded through lessons that are far from reality and cruelly indifferent to individual differences in brains, background, talent and feelings.

Gene Lehman

Education is indoctrination, if you are white - subjugation if you are black. James Baldwin

We can no more ordain learning by order, coercion and commandment than we can produce love by rape or threat.

Peter Jones

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the prison warders and the governor. George Bernard Shaw

To learn to know oneself, and to find a life worth living and work worth doing, is problem and challenge enough, without having to waste time on the fake and unworthy challenges of school - pleasing the teacher, staying out of trouble, fitting in with the gang, being popular, doing what everyone else does. John Holt

Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who steep upon the streets. John Taylor Gatto

The only real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions. Tolstoy

Getting it wrong is part of getting it right. Charles Handy

Truth springs from argument amongst friends. David Hume

Most people quarrel because they don't know how to argue. G.K. Chesterton

"There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me." Autobiography: Surprised by Joy - C. S. Lewis (Many Christians -- and most fundamentalists -- consider Lewis a guiding light. Yet very few - if any - fundamentalists would make "all kinds of books" available to their children, including those that are "emphatically not suitable." Generally speaking, fundamentalists want their children to grow into wholesome, sound people without acknowledging - alongside St. Paul - that we must "test all things, keeping those that are good." At the risk of mixing metaphors, fundamentalists confine their kids to "terrariums," bathing them in nothing but light. Still the brightest lights cast the deepest shadows, and utopias - to the extent that they're utopian - are tedious places, lacking dramatic conflict, and therefore lacking real goodness. I've read that the New Testamental saying "Be you perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" would be better translated: "Be you complete as your heavenly Father is complete." Fundamentalists don't afford their children sufficiently-diverse exposure to become complete. By not "giving the Devil his due" we shortchange God. Indeed, at the outset of Job, God and Satan wager on his soul's fate. It's as if God Himself "needs" Satan to introduce the conflict in which virtue is born. We might wisely remember Pascal's dictum: "By aspiring to become like angels, we fall lower than beasts." The fate of our own souls may depend on it.)

Most criticism of the old education, and the old concepts it conserves and transmits, from Paul Goodman to John Gardner, makes the point that the students who endure it come out as passive, acquiescent, dogmatic, intolerant, authoritarian, inflexible, conservative personalities who desperately need to resist change in an effort to keep their illusion of certainty intact.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist. John Taylor Gatto

Arithmetic ... is overvalued; in British elementary schools it takes up far more of the time than it should. The average man should be able to do accounts, but beyond that he will seldom have occasion for sums. What he may have learnt of complicated arithmetic will be of no more practical use to him in later life than would the amount of Latin he could have learnt in the same time. Bertrand Russell

The adults of today spent twenty-five hours of their young lives learning quadratic equations, with varying degrees of success. Was it time well spent? Phillip Gammage

When we put together in one scheme such elements as a prescribed curriculum, similar assignments for all students, lecturing as almost the only mode of instruction, standard texts by which all students are externally evaluated, and instructor chosen grades as the measure of learning, then we can almost guarantee that meaningful learning will be at an absolute minimum. Carl Rogers

Assessment, more than religion, has become the opiate of the people. Patricia Broadfoot

This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a crossbar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They'd search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog, and they'd put it on the other end of the plank. Then they'd guess the weight of the stone.

John Dewey

The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely instead on the evaluation of certified officials. John Taylor Gatto

A child born in the U.K. stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. R.D. Laing

The aim of education is to induce the largest amount of neurosis that an individual can bear without cracking up. W. H. Auden

Do we create conflict by conditioning our children to pledge their allegiance, obey and defend their country without question? ... Or is he or she, by the very face of his or her commitment to and identification with the fragmented nationalistic view, paradoxically the enemy of peace? Terrence Webster-Doyle

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. Stanley Milgram (The Milgram Study of Obedience to Authority) Here's my personal insight into the "Milgram mechanism." Late one night, while driving a taxi in Rochester, New York, a couple guys flagged me down in front of "Nick Tahoe's Hots" on west Main Street (the only place Grampa Noll ever warned me against...) I was directed me to a Ward Street address located in Rochester's northeast ghetto and ten mnutes later stopped to let them out. Immediately, the fellow in the back seat applied a headlock, simultaneously pressing a knife to my throat. The guy in the passenger seat put a gun to my head, screaming "Kill the muthafucka! Kill the muthafucka!" Then the fellow with the knife squirted "acid" in my eyes. (This took place at a time when a local thief was gouging out victims' eyes to prevent identification.) I did my best to assure my attackers I was eager to comply, but - now blinded - I explained that I stashed the cash in a bag under the seat. I promised to withdraw it very, very slowly and give it to them. To my amazement, I'm here to tell the tale. From Ward Street, I ran to Hamiltan Cab Co., stopping at a greasy spoon to ask for help. I drew blank stares and my for a dime to use the pay phone went unheeded. After treatment at Genesee Hospital, I went home. Before dawn, the phone rang. It was RPD inviting me to view a lineup. At headquarters, I was escorted into a small room with a one-way glass-mirror. Chief Detective Fantagrossi asked if I recognized anyone. I said the fellow on the left looked like the guy but I couldn't swear his identity in court. Then, Fantagrossi surprised me. He leaned gently against the side of my body, saying: 'C'mon look again. I'm sure you can make a positive I.D.' I suppose Fantagrossi was certain everybody in the lineup was guilty of something -- probably multiple offenses -- and that he just wanted to "put one of them away" for a few years. However, his eagerness for "summary justice" ignored my own need for personal integrity. The experience left a clear (and lasting) impression that many people are ill-prepared to withstand "the customary pressure" applied by "the authorities." (Several years ago, a University Pyschology Department conducted a study involving a fictitious job offer. "Job candidates" gathered in a small, well-lit vestibule, where, suddenly, a suspicious-looking male stormed in, dashed across the room, removed a laptop computer from an end table, and exited furtively. Minutes later, a Pscyh Department official called for the first interviewee, but noticing the computer had disappeared, asked what happened. After listening to the "candidates'" account, the official referred to a recent rash of on-campus thefts. Then, one-by-one, "the job applicants" were asked to look at mug shots. Fully 30% of these eyewitnesses positively identified the wrong man.)

School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that it teachings must be taken on faith. John Taylor Gatto

Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement (USA) has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; ... the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

John Taylor Gatto

Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe. H.G. Wells

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in its students. John Ciardi

Two institutions at present control our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. John Taylor Gatto

Education is an admirable thing but it as well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Oscar Wilde

A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde

It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator's role is to regulate the way the world 'enters into' the students. His task is to organise a process which already happens spontaneously, to 'fill' the students by making deposits of information which he considers constitute true knowledge. And since men 'receive' the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted man, because he is more 'fit' for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purpose of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it. Paolo Freire

The hard task of education is to liberate and strengthen a youth's initiative and at the same time to see to it that he knows what is necessary to cope with the ongoing activities and culture of society, so that his initiative can be relevant. It is absurd to think that this task can be accomplished by so much sitting in a box facing front, manipulating symbols at the direction of distant administrators. This is rather a way to regiment and brainwash. Paul Goodman

We must have some concept of the kind of person we wish to produce before we can have any definite opinion as to the education which we consider best. Bertrand Russell (God, I'm glad an agnostic said that.)

All too often, in debates about education, the basic questions are ignored in favour of mere technical issues. We should always begin by asking, 'What are we educating for?' 'What sort of people are we expecting to produce?' 'What kind of society do we envisage?' Clive Harber

We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human. Jacquelyn Jacqueline Small

The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. Plato

(The following passage is very difficult but very rewarding. Hang in there. A.A.) It should be pointed out that if we tried to build education on the single pattern of "the scientific idea of man" and carry it out accordingly, we could only do so by distorting or warping this idea: for we should have to ask what is the nature and destiny of man, and we should be pressing the only idea at our disposal, that is the scientific one, for an answer to our question. Then we would try, contrary to its type, to draw from it a kind of metaphysics. From the logical point of view, we would have a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight; and from the practical point of view, we would have a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state. Jacques Maritain

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its 'homework'.

John Taylor Gatto

People who can't think are ripe for dictatorships. Carl Rogers

What good fortune for those in power that people do not think. Adolf Hitler

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt. Bertrand Russell

I deeply believe that traditional teaching is an almost completely futile, wasteful, overrated function in today's changing world. It is successful mostly in giving children who can't grasp the material, a sense of failure. Carl Rogers

But, good gracious you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

Saki H.H. Munro (Yale comes to mind.)

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things - the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and counterfeit. Samuel Johnson

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

George Macauley Trevelyan

There is no point ... in learning the 'answers' for very soon there will be different answers. Paul Goodman

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things. G. K. Chesterton

The greatest challenges facing both the arts and education are how to navigate the perilous course between adventure and discipline; how to respond to tradition without either becoming its slave or rejecting it. Robert Corrigan

All my own work as a teacher and learner has led me to believe that teaching is a very strong medicine, which like all strong medicines can quickly and easily turn into a poison. At the right time (i.e. when the student has asked for it) and in very small doses, it can indeed help learning. But at the wrong times, or in too large doses, it will slow down learning or prevent it altogether. John Holt (I'm not sure I agree with this, but it merits consideration.)

much of so-called 'discipline' is founded on unusual and extraordinary behaviour patterns which prepare children for nothing much. The result is either a rejection of all adult authority as meaningless, or a blind acceptance that it is adults or others who tell you what to do, and you need not work it out for yourself. Lynne Davies

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age, purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. For the most part it only serves to enlarge stupidity, inflate conceit, enhance credulity and put those subjected to it at the mercy of brainwashers with printing presses, radio and television at their disposal. Malcolm Muggeridge

Why should we subsidise intellectual curiosity? Ronald Reagan

The only form of society which facilitates the continued evolution of the human species is a democratic form of society, and furthermore, the development of such a democratic society is dependent to a large degree on the democratisation of schools and schooling. John Dewey

What the world now needs is not competition but organisation and cooperation; all belief in the utility of competition has become an anachronism. ... the emotions connected with it are the emotions of hostility and ruthlessness. The conception of society as an organic whole is very difficult for those whose minds have been steeped in competitive ideas. Ethically, therefore, no less than economically, it is undesirable to teach the young to be competitive. Bertrand Russell

They know enough who know how to learn. Henry Adams

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught. George Halifax

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person. Alice Miller

Break their wills betimes; begin this great work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all. Let him have nothing he cries for, absolutely nothing, great or small. Make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. Break his will now and his soul will live, and he will bless you to all eternity. John Wesley

Among all the leading figures of the Third Reich, I have not been able to find a single one who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing. Shouldn't that give us a great deal of food for thought? Alice Miller

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Winston Churchill

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Charlotte Whitton

Robert Burns' ... instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated... Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself... The only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton works on the web

Inquisitiveness

I owe more to my ability to fantasize than to any knowledge I've ever acquired. Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Einstein

"The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances." Albert Einstein

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."

Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." G. K. Chesterton

"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers." James Thurber

"A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity." Samuel Johnson

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke

He who is ashamed of asking is ashamed of learning. Danish Proverb

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. Chinese proverb

"A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them." Albert Einstein

"If you find a good solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem." Dr. Robert Anthony

"Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why." Bernard Baruch

"The important thing is to not stop questioning." Albert Einstein