Quotes

John Stuart Mill

A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding 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.

George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. In prison they may torture your body but they do not torture your brains

Ivan Illich

...we have come to realise that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

Meighan

When I trained as a teacher I was introduced to two basic roles. One was that of a crowd control steward... The other basic role was that of crowd-instructor

A recent MORI poll, commissioned by the Campaign for Learning, found that 90% of adults were favourably inclined towards further learning for themselves.....The bad news is that 75% said they were unhappy and alienated in the school environment and that, therefore, they preferred to learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other than a school-type setting.

John Holt

I say above all else don't let your home become [a] miniature copy of the school. No lesson plans, no quizzes, no tests, no report cards! even leaving your child alone would be better; at least they would figure out some things on their own. Live together as well as you can; enjoy life together as much as you can.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.

How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task. When we feel powerful and competent, we leap at difficult tasks. The difficulty does not discourage us; we think: "Sooner or later, I'm going to get this." At other times we can only think: "I'll never get this, it's too hard for me, I never was any good at this kind of thing, why do I have to do it," etc. Part of the art of teaching is being able to sense which of these moods learners are in. People can go from one mood to the other very quickly.

There are times when even the most skilful learner must admit to himself that for the time being he is trying to butt his head through a stone wall, and that there is no sense in it. At such times teachers are inclined to use students as a kind of human battering ram. I've done it too often myself. It doesn't work.

A word to the wise, or even the unwise, is infuriating because it is insulting. When we teach without being asked, we are saying, in effect, 'You're not smart enough to know that you should know this, and not smart enough to learn it.

Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children.

When they learn in their own way and for their own reasons, children learn so much more rapidly and effectively than we could possibly teach them, that we can afford to throw away our curricula and our timetables, and set them free, at least most of the time, to learn on their own.

What is essential is to realise that children learn independently, not in bunches; that they learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please or appease the adults in power; and that they ought to be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.

Henry Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.

Aristotle

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

James Baldwin

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him.

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Alec Bourne

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.

Adolf Hitler

"My ideal of education is hard. Whatever is weak must be hammered away. In the fortresses of my militant order a generation of young people will grow to strike fear into the heart of the world. Violent, masterful, unafraid, cruel youth is what I want. Young people must be all that. They must withstand pain. There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The free--magnificent predator must flash from their eyes again. I want them strong and beautiful...That way I can fashion things anew."

Joseph Stalin

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed

Haim Ginott (Educator)

"Dear Teachers: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by physicians, infants killed by nurses. So I am suspicious of education. My request is - help your students become human. Never produce… educated Eichmanns.

Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done -- men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.

Henry Peter Broughan

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

G K Chesterton

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

Alec Bourne

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

Isaac Asimov

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

Buckminster Fuller

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralysed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Epictetus

Only the educated are free.

Paul Karl Feyerabend

The best education consists in immunising people against systematic attempts at education

Malcolm Forbes

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Leonardo da Vinci

Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

Prince Charles (2004)

"What is wrong with everyone nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities? This is to do with the learning culture in schools as a consequence of child-centred system which admits no failure. People think they can all be pop stars, High Court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability. This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history." - [and they say the art of irony is dead]

Robert Frost

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.

Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

Horace Mann

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equaliser of the conditions of man, - the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

H. L. Mencken

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.

Martin H. Fischer

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.

Laurence Peter

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

The majority of parents feel affection for their children, and this sets limits to the harm they do them. But education authorities have no affection for the children concerned; at best, they are actuated by public spirit, which is directed towards the community as a whole, and not merely towards the children; at worst, they are politicians engaged in squabbles for plums

Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society."

An orchestra requires men with different talents and, within limits, different tastes; if all men insisted upon playing the trombone, orchestral music would be impossible. Social co-operation, in like manner, requires differences of taste and aptitude, which are less likely to exist if all children are exposed to the same influences than if parental differences are allowed to affect them

Children who are forced to eat acquire a loathing for food and children who are forced to learn acquire a loathing for knowledge.

B. F. Skinner

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Mark Twain

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Edward Everett

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.

Lou Ann Walker

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings.

Oscar Wilde

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

Albert Einstein

It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food handed out under such coercion were to be selected accordingly.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid

Thoreau

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Edward de Bono

I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world, so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster.

Heraclitus

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Michael Barber (Head of Standards and Effectiveness Unit of the Dfee 2002)

The middle years should be so busy, so demanding, so active, so adventurous that adolescents should barely have time for introspection

John Lubbock

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Jean Bendell

'School's Out' - their ability to see the point in learning the darn thing anyway, the chances are that they will take in very little.

It could be argued that teachers are the best people to teach our children as they have been specially trained for this. But just as equipment is only of value if the child learns through its use - it has no worth otherwise - the qualifications of the teachers are of little value unless the child is actually learning.

Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller's teacher)

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must taught to think.

Petronius (Satyricon)

I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.

Edward Grieg

I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.

John Updike ('Connect' New York Oct. 98)

The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents, so they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

St. Augustine

I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.

Edward Fiske

Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.

Thomas Edison

I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.

John F. Kennedy

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

Dorothy L. Sayers

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

David P. Gardner

We learn simply by the exposure of living. Much that passes for education is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.

John W. Gardner

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

Sarah Josepha Hale

There can be no education without leisure, and without leisure education is worthless.

Allan Bloom

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

Edmund Burke

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Sigrid Undset (Writer & Nobel Laureate Literature)

"I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes."

Trevelyan

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

Daniel Goleman

'Emotional Intelligence' - Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

Howard Gardner

'Multiple Intelligences' - The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him towards a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor... And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

We should use kids' positive states to draw them into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies....You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure from being engaged in.

Postman & Weingartner

'Teaching as a Subversive Activity' - Everyone, at present, is in favour of having students learn the fundamentals. For most people, 'the three R's', or some variation of them, represent what is fundamental to a learner. However, if one observes a learner and asks oneself, "What is it that this organism needs without which he cannot thrive?", it is impossible to come up with the answer, "the three R's".

English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you 'take' and when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of Education?)

'Independent'

Editorial 7/1/00 - The Government's favourite formula for raising educational standards has the merit of simplicity. We are now top of the European league table in at least one respect: our children are subjected to more national school exams than those in any other country... Parents may comfort themselves with the thought that, however badly educated their children may be when they leave school, they will at least be able to do exams.

Thomas Armstrong

The newer and broader picture suggests that the child emerges into literacy by actively speaking, reading, and writing in the context of real life, not through filling out phonics worksheets or memorising words

Charlotte Mason

We prefer that they [children] should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not, - how much does the youth know when he has finished his education - but how much does he care and about how many orders of things does he care?

Anatole France

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

Alvin Toffler

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again.

America's schools ... still operate like factories. They subject the raw material (children) to standardised instruction and routine inspection. An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualised, customised education?

Emma Goldman

No one has yet realised the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

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.

Christopher Morley

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Benjamin Jowett

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.

E. M. Forster

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Fats Domino

A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D. or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B.

Carl Sagan

When you make the finding yourself - even if you are the last person on Earth to see the light - you will never forget it.

Kierkegaard

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Paul E. Gray

The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education.

E.M.Forster

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

David Guterson

'Family Matters - Why Home schooling Makes Sense' - For thousands of years, in thousands of places, families educated their own. This tradition changed not because a better method was found but because economic conditions required it. To work one had to leave one's children; one's children, furthermore, had to be trained for tasks no-one in their purview could be seen doing. For these reasons institutionalised schooling was invented' and while it adequately addressed a set of economic problems it inspired a new set of human ones that are psychological, emotional, and even spiritual in nature.

I do not pine for a different place and time. I only point out what we have traded off. I think certain good things are recoverable, though without the life that once surrounded them they must inevitably take on different meanings. One of these is the tradition of parental and communal responsibility for the daily instruction of the young. Today this is denied us because teaching has been institutionalised, a convenience in a time of industry and profit when citizen-labourers perform economic functions more efficiently without children present. But for whom is such a state of affairs indeed convenient?

Learning theory tells us to teach children as individuals who learn in their own unique manner. The finest possible curriculum is precisely the one that starts with each child's singular means of learning. Instruction and guidance are best provided by those with an intimate understanding of the individual child and a deep commitment to the child's education. These principles derive not merely from the Home schooling movement but from contemporary research into how children learn. They are not merely adages fabricated by Home schoolers but precepts grounded in a science that should inspire us to reconsider both our roles as parents and the shape of public education.

Alan Thomas

'Educating Children at Home' - The opportunity to develop and practice social skills in school is quite limited. Children spend nearly all their time in school with other children born during the same academic year as themselves, and a great deal of time outside school as well. In school, there is little social contact with younger or older children and even less with adults. It is easy to see how peer mores, values and codes of behaviour become entrenched, resulting in considerable pressure to conform and the threat of ostracism or exclusion from the group for those who do not. Moreover, up to one and a half hours a day in school is specifically set aside for social recreation in the playground, where children are thrown together with nothing much to do. It is not surprising that playground hierarchies emerge and bullying is rife.

The consequence is that the 'social' skills acquired are those which may be essential for survival in school but have little applicability in the outside world. There is virtually no opportunity to relate socially to adults in school in order to learn wider social skills. Ironically, such skills can only be learned outside school hours. Teachers do, of course, set up social scenarios and discuss with children how to behave in given social circumstances. But these are no substitute for learning through real-life, dynamic social contact.

Rabindranath Tagore

School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school....my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in.

Anthony Hopkins

I think children can be very cruel especially in adolescence and if you are slow, and I was (I was in a school which was quite competitive) you do get a lot of slamming about from the other kids... It built up a tremendous resentment in me because I was also bad at sport and athletics and all I could do was play the piano. So I always got the sense in my adolescent years that 'Oh, Hopkins, you know he's, well he's not worth much, or he's a failure.

Thomas Moore

We live in a hierarchical world in which we defend ourselves ....from our eternal infancy and childhood by insisting on a graded, necessary elevation through learning and technological sophistication out of the child into the adult. This is not a true initiation that values both the previous form of existence and the newly attained one; it is a defence against the humiliating reality of the child.

James Hillman

'The Soul's Code - In Search of Character & Calling' - Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do. These impulsion's of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, 'hyper' children - all words invented by adults in defence of their misunderstanding.

Often it was not in school, but outside of it - in extracurricular activities or during time spent altogether away from school - that calling appeared. It is as if the image in the heart in so many cases is hampered by the program of tuition and its time bound regularity.

Margaret Mead

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

Alice Miller

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

Marina Warner

'Managing Monsters' The Reith Lectures 1994 - Childhood placed at a tangent to adulthood, perceived as special and magical, precious and dangerous at once, has turned into some volatile stuff - hydrogen, or mercury, which has to be contained. The separate condition of the child has never been so bounded by thinking, so established in law as it is today......How we treat children really tests who we are, fundamentally conveys who we hope to be.

Emma Goldman

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

John Taylor Gatto

By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. 1. Confusion 2. Class Position 3. Indifference 4. Emotional Dependency 5. Intellectual Dependency 6. Provisional Self-Esteem 7. One Can't Hide. 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

Sir William Haley

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

Rene Carayol

Monitoring is all about people -- it's about caring, about relationships and sensitivity. As it becomes increasingly in vogue it is becoming too formulated -- concerned with performance metrics, critical success factors, investment and spending. It'll be a disaster.

Charles Handy

It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society's goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don't get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn.

Sam Houston

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.

Anne Sullivan

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special 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.

Andrew Linzey

Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue... It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.

Sir Claus Moser

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Dr. John G. Hibben

Education is the ability to meet life's situations.

R. I. Rees

Formal education is but an incident in the lifetime of an individual. Most of us who have given the subject any study have come to realise that education is a continuous process ending only when ambition comes to a halt.

James B. Stockdale

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

Carl Rogers

It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behaviour. I realise increasingly that I am only interested in leanings which significantly influence behaviour. I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behaviour is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As a consequence of the above, I realise that I have lost interest in being a teacher.

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

Anthony Storr

It appears, therefore, that some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one's own inner world are all facilitated by solitude.

Benjamin Rush (Signatory of the US Declaration of Independence)

"Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. He must be taught to amass wealth, but it must be only to increase his power of contributing to the wants and demands of the state. [This education] can be done effectually only by the interference and aid of the Legislature."

Ellwood Cubberley (Dean of Education, Stanford)

"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."

William T. Harris (Commissioner of Education U.S. 1889)

"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." –

Lester Frank Ward (Professor of Sociology, Brown University)

"The secret of the superiority of the state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society...the result desired by the state is a wholly different one than that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils."

Edward Ross (Professor of Economics, Stanford University, 1900)

"[The role of the schoolmaster is to] collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading board."

H.L. Mencken

"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."

John Dewey (Educational Philosopher, proponent of modern public schools)

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

Chester M. Pierce (Harvard psychiatrist expert in public education)

1973 International Education Seminar - "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future."

Harper's Magazine

May 2004 - Chance that an American adult believes that 'politics and government are too complicated to understand': 1 in 3, Chance that an American who was home-schooled feels this way: 1 in 25