Education

"It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you." John Taylor Gatto

"We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that." John Taylor Gatto

"We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison." John Taylor Gatto

"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." Bertrand Russell

"The media may constitute the most powerful education system ever known to man." Fred Fedler

"If you homeschool your kids they won't be like the other kids. Yep... that's the whole point." Axiomatic Enemy of the State

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." Herbert George Wells

"I acquired all my academic titles by believing in a false doctrine. A studied economist understands less about macroeconomics than a cow does about flying, because he first has to dig himself out of a swamp of preconceived opinions and errors in thinking in order to even reach the surface, or to get back to where he was before he let himself be committed to the stupification asylum." Professor Dr. Dr. Wolfgang Berger

"And they created the school as the devil commanded. The child loves nature, so he was locked in four walls. He can not sit without moving, so he was forced into immobility. He likes to work with his hands, and he began to teach theories and ideas. He likes to talk - he was told to remain silent. He seeks to understand - he was commanded to learn by heart. He would like to explore and search for knowledge himself, but he was given them in ready form. And then the children learned what they would never have learned in other conditions. They learned to lie and pretend." Adolphe Ferrière

"Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on." Noam Chomsky

"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

"School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged." John Taylor Gatto

"Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought." Edward Bernays

"We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and of teachers trained for ever longer periods." Ivan Illich