Quotes!

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Thomas H. Huxley (1825 - 1895)

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
-Emma Goldman

No doubt to teach one's own children...takes special qualities. But these are qualities that many people have, or with a little help, can get. ...The home-schooling movement is full of such people, "ordinary" people doing things that they never would have thought they could do - learning the law, questioning the experts, holding their ground against arrogant and threatening authorities, defending themselves and their convictions... Seeing them, other ordinary people think they can do the same, and soon they do. This is why it may be a little misleading to speak of the homeschooling "movement." Most people think of a movement as something like an army, a few generals and a great many buck privates. In the movement for homeschooling, everyone is a general.
-John Holt, Teach Your Own (New York:Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1981) pp. 68-69.

Education – compulsory schooling, compulsory learning – is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.
-John Holt

The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority."
-Walter Karp

If school success were a reliable index of human capacity, we should be able to go a step further and say that the intelligence test is a general measure of human capacity. But of course no such claim can be made for school success, for that would be to say that the purpose of the schools is to measure capacity. It is impossible to admit this. The child’s success with school work cannot be a measure of a child’s success in life. On the contrary, his success in life must be a significant measure of the school’s success in developing the capacities of the child. If a child fails in school and then fails in life, the school cannot sit back and say: you see how accurately I predicted this. Unless we are to admit that education is essentially impotent, we have to throw back the child’s failure at the school, and describe it as a failure not by the child but by the school.
-Walter Lippmann

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all: it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."
-H. L. Mencken

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
-H. L. Mencken

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?
-Maria Montessori

It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. ...It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.
-Bertrand Russell

"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
-Sir Walter Scott

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.
-Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , Ch. 2

I tried to teach my child with books;
He gave me only puzzled looks.
I tried to teach my child with words;
They passed him by often unheard.
Despairingly, I turned aside;
“How shall I teach this child?” I cried.
Into my hand he put the key;
“ COME, ” he said, “ PLAY WITH ME !”
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