Education

"The well-known school critic and teacher John Taylor Gatto identifies seven lessons as the real teachings of school: Confusing the student Awakening class consciousness Teaching indifference Creating intellectual and emotional dependence Weakening self-confidence and Accustoming students to constant supervision. "School condemns most people to being lowly building blocks in a pyramidal social model. In collaboration with television, schooling robs children of the time they need to develop a unique personality, thereby preventing them from growing up. School has replaced the ‘family curriculum’ with the components of privacy, independence, and social life. In its place has come the factory school, a prison for children's souls that fragments social relationships into networks and cannot be survived without damage." "It replaces the intellectual growth of children with the violent creation of subjects. It kills the curiosity of its subjects, places them in a dense fog of confusion from which many will never be able to free themselves in their entire lives, it blocks their path to individual freedom and denies them the fulfillment that comes with a free spirit."" John Taylor Gatto

"The most 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." Henry Louis Mencken

"In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse." Edward Bernays

"School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary." Ivan Illich

"Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods." Neil Postman

"Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching." Neil Postman

"Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know." Neil Postman

"It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles. H.L. Mencken once said that the state doesn't just want to make you obey. It tries to make you want to obey. And that's one thing the government schools do very well." Lew Rockwell

"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding." Ezra Pound

"In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy." Arthur C. Clarke

"Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything." George Carlin

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." Doris Lessing

"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools." Doris Lessing

"Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that." Doris Lessing