Quotes About Education

education and schooling are, as we all have experienced, mutually exclusive terms.

Central to this understanding is the fact that schools are not failing. On the contrary, they are spectacularly successful in doing precisely what they are intended to do, and what they have been intended to do since their inception.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

imitation of notable models as an effective spring of learning; was the most ancient and effective motivation to learn—to become like someone admirable—put to death deliberately by institutional pedagogy.

At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among so many different warring interests that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook.

In theoretical, metaphorical terms, the idea I began to explore was this one: that teaching is nothing like the art of painting, where, by the addition of material to a surface, an image is synthetically produced, but more like the art of sculpture, where, by the subtraction of material, an image already locked in the stone is enabled to emerge. It is a crucial distinction.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.

School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.

The "Curriculum of Family" is at the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum — it's time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief.

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed, it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you.

Institutional goals, however sane and well-intentioned, are unable to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals.

When children are stripped of a primary experience base as confinement schooling must do to justify its existence, the natural sequence of learning is destroyed, a sequence which puts experience first.

How many schoolteachers were aware of what they actually were a part of? Surely a number close to zero. In schoolteaching, as in hamburger-flipping, the paycheck is the decisive ingredient. No insult is meant, at bottom this is what realpolitik means. We all have to eat.

Any economy in which the most common tasks are the shuffling of paper, the punching of buttons, and the running of mouths isn't an order into which we should be pushing kids as if such jobs there were the avenue to a good life.

The most important things worth knowing are innate in you already.

At the heart of any school reforms that aren't simply tuning the mudsill mechanism lie two beliefs: 1) That talent, intelligence, grace, and high accomplishment are within the reach of every kid, and 2) That we are better off working for ourselves than for a boss.

I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable. They cannot function if their central myths are exposed and abandoned.

We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers. Surely this is one of the most radical acts in human history, not the least of its breathtakingly radical assertions being that you must attend for your own good!

When we want better families, better neighbors, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far from the reach of systems.

The whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty.

In the absence of a perfect universal mentor, books and other texts are the best and cheapest stand-ins, always available to those who know where to look. Watching details of an assembly line or a local election unfold isn't very educational unless you have been led in careful ways to analyze the experience. Reading is the skeleton key for all who lack a personal tutor of quality.

School is a perfect place to turn science into religion, but it's the wrong place to learn science, for sure.