Quotes About Schooling

When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

I don't think we'll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what's rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate"; that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing.

Work in classrooms isn't significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn't answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn't contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless.

I have always been thankful that Mother started teaching me ahead of time, because it enabled me to skip half the grades in school and thus get out quicker. To me, attending school was a gloomy and unjust imprisonment for offenses I had not yet committed. I still think it is unfair for the authorities to assume that children are going to be so wicked that they are prepared arbitrarily for institutional life instead of activities in the open.

Are you still teaching?

My mother says I should be nice to everyone. Either school was different when she was young or she just doesn't remember.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

In the 1820s, the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. were some of the only countries where the average population received at least two years of formal schooling.

I spent grades one through nine in Baltimore City, leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of education I was receiving.

Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.

A diploma is a dunce hat in disguise.

In Hawaii, after somebody introduces themselves, the next question is, 'What high school did you go to?' From there, it's either 'Oh, OK, it's cool, I know some family,' or it's trash-talking to the max, like 'my school is better than your school.' This is how it kind of is back there.

My father's schooling during the 1930s was heavy with memorization; eight decades later, he is reaping the benefits.

You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.

When I was a child I didn't care about getting an education, and I didn't finish high school.

I would not call myself Catholic anymore, but I went to 16 years of Catholic school: grade school, high school and college.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

I went to night school and summer school, I made that whole year up and I actually graduated on time. Also, I got a part-time job at the radio station.

I always thought I had a problem socially, because I was pulled out of school so early. I had a tough time talking to other kids and being comfortable with them.

At that [childhood] time, of course, if you were involved in art, it was going to be drawing and painting, because that's the only thing that was taught in the schools.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.