Education

"School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes." John Taylor Gatto

"The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his is a twofold job: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist." Edward Bernays

"Learning is like rowing against the current. As soon as you stop, you drift back." Laotse

"A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life." Henry Ford

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." Henry Ford

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." Ivan Illich

"The pupil is ... 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new." Ivan Illich

"School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition." Ivan Illich

"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." Ivan Illich

"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation." Ivan Illich

"In youth we learn; in age we understand." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

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

"Someday, in the distant future, our grand-children' s grand-children will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge." Platon

"The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation." Thomas Alva Edison