Quotes About Education

To educate the peasantry, three things are needed: schools, schools and schools.

Teach French and unteach sincerity.

pay somebody to go to school for me.

So LISTEN UP, class! Today we're going to learn all about chain reactions.

Education is about the distribution of knowledge... and to whom we actually distribute this particular commodity is a major question in this country.

I might be a bit slow, but I can learn.

It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.

at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. "No, everything I've ever learned,", he said, "has come from books. I'd be in the darkness without them.

Starting in 1964, average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests went steadily down, and per student spending went steadily up.33

Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school—where most students received near-automatic deferments until mid-1968—they often found themselves drafted after they got out of high school.

Civilization is knowledge, even more than it is urbanization, for you cannot have the latter without the former. Everything builds on everything else. And the knowledge of civilization is kept in repositories known as...LIBRARIES, and if books burn, civilization burns with them.

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud" goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs. But we need not even look inside.

Once you have learned how 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 AND CHARLES WEINGARTNER2

Not understanding their past renders many Americans incapable of thinking effectively about our present and future.

Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during the period.

Surely the desired end product of high school U.S. history courses is graduates who can think clearly, distinguish evidence from opinion, and separate truth from what comedian Stephen Colbert famously called "truthiness.

No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.

When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.

Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than cover it. Instead of "teaching the book," teachers must develop a list of 30–50 topics they want to teach in their U.S. history course. Every topic should excite or at least interest them. What meaning might it have to students' lives?

The duty of the historian," Gordon Craig has reminded us, "is to restore to the past the options it once had." Craig also pointed out that this is an appropriate way to teach history and to make it memorable.

Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks. —THOMAS BAILEY

K-12 teachers. Many work in classrooms for as many as thirty-five hours a week; on top of that they must assign, read, and comment on homework, prepare and grade exams, and develop next week's lesson plans.

Textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to other teaching materials. Why are history textbooks so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Textbooks are often muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and to indoctrinate blind patriotism.

Indeed, history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.