Education

"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

"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

"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

"The State shall make no law with respect to the establishment of education." Ivan Illich

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying." Friedrich Nietzsche

"I've nothing against schools! I'm against compulsory schooling." Ivan Illich

"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

"The college and university systems, at least, have become like television. There's a bit of this and a bit of that and some compulsory program with its components connected in a way that only a planner could understand." Ivan Illich

"By the early seventeenth century, a new consensus began to arise: the idea that man was born incompetent for society and remained so unless he was provided with 'education.'" Ivan Illich

"The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions." Noam Chomsky

"Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community." John Taylor Gatto

"Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood." Neil Postman