Quotes About Education

Because this report considered "commitment to multicultural social studies education" to be crucial, it called for "extensive staff development" which would "address attitudes"—i.e., indoctrination—and which would extend even to the schools' clerical staffs and bus drivers.7 In short, the call for cultural "diversity" is a call for ideological conformity.

To refer to Stuyvesant High School as a "privileged little ivory tower" may be clever, but cleverness is not wisdom.

Whether the elite public high schools of New York were overwhelmingly Jewish in one era or overwhelmingly Asian in a later era, their lack of demographic "diversity" seems not to have adversely affected their educational performances or their graduates' achievements in later life. And that is what such schools are there for, not to present a tableau that matches fashionable preconceptions.

What was said of Romania's institutions of higher education between the two World Wars—that they were numerically swollen, academically rather lax, and politically overheated, as well as veritable incubators of surplus bureaucrats, politicians, and demagogues56—could be said of such institutions in other nations in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during that era and in various nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in later times.

Women's rise in higher-level occupations in the second half of the twentieth century continued to follow the rise in their age of marriage, which rose sharply and finished the century significantly higher than it was at the beginning,14 while the birth rate fell sharply and was much lower at the end of the century than it was at the beginning.15 As the age of first marriage climbed to record high levels, women rose to record high levels in higher education and higher occupations.

Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

No small part of the existing problems of the public schools is that the school day is already so long and boring, with so little to challenge the ablest students. Moreover, many average and below-average students who have lost all interest are retained by compulsory attendance laws for years past the point where their presence is accomplishing anything other than providing jobs for educators.

Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

While years of education are often used as a rough proxy for human capital in general, not only is much human capital gained outside of educational institutions,[...]some education even produces negative human capital, in the form of attitudes, expectations, and aversions that negatively impact the economy.

public schools have increasingly become militant dispensers of indoctrination with fashionable avant-grade attitudes

By the late eighteenth century, the lowlands of Scotland had developed the most extensive system of education in

It would be naive to overlook the self-interest behind many of the glowing pleas for "expanded educational opportunity for youth." Since youth must compete against each other for jobs, more "opportunity" for tax-subsidized education of middle-class students means a continued escalation of degree requirements for jobs and corresponding restriction of opportunity for youths from poorer families.

Definitions being what they are, young people who waste their time around the house or on street corners are called "unemployed," while those who waste their time in classrooms are called "students.

If white racism is the cause of lower educational and economic outcomes for black Americans, why are black Nigerians exempt?

The strategic location of the intelligentsia, whether in the mass media or in educational institutions, enables them to filter what information gets through to the general public, protecting the welfare state vision and with it a flattering vision of themselves.

The primary objective of Federal efforts in family life and sex education has been to reduce unwanted pregnancy rates among teenagers, while the primary goal of most sex educators appears to be encouragement of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality.

the selling of curriculum materials of a more general nature is a substantial business in itself. A captive audience of more than 40 million school children is attractive to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. The susceptibility of educators to such fasionable "innovations" is what opens the floodgates to permit the intrusion of such programs into the public schools. This susceptibility is only partly spontaneous.

People who have already been out in the real world, practicing for years whatever their particular specialty might be, have some basis for determining which things are relevant enough to go into a curriculum to teach those who follow. The idea that students can determine relevance in advance is one of the many counterproductive notions to come out of the 1960s.

The need for Nigerian clerks and other subordinates to help man the colonial administration required creating a new class of African people with education in the English language, with Westernized concepts, and with experience in Westernized ways of doing things.

To the Ibos, Western education was a rare opportunity to be seized.

This has often been carried to the point of encouraging lagging groups to proudly cling to their own culture, or even resurrect it in some cases, with little concern that these groups' economic and educational lags might be— at least in part— a result of the cultures they were being encouraged to cling to.

As late as 1951, out of the 16 million people in the northern region, only one had a full university degree-and he was a convert to Christianity.

Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.

23 Two centuries later, the task appears less simple and such expressions as "brain-washing" and "reeducation" camps have chilling overtones in the light of history, though that has not stopped indoctrination efforts in American schools and colleges, led by those who still have the vision of the anointed today.