EDUCATION

"Education has produced a vast population able to read, but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." - G M Trevelyan * * * "Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education." - Bertrand Russell * * * "In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer * * * "The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education.... The publication of high thoughts is the dynamic power in the arteries of life; it is the very soul of the world. Thoughts are a boundless sea, and the effects and varying conditions of existence are as the separate forms and individual limits of the waves; not until the sea boils up will the waves rise and scatter their pearls of knowledge on the shore of life." - Abdu'l-Baha, Persia, 1875 * * * "That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. 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 and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everwhere else." - H. L. Mencken * * * "More generally, people have little specific knowledge of what is happening around them. An academic study that appeared right before the presidential election reports that less than 30 percent of the population was aware of the positions of the candidates on major issues, though 86 percent knew the name of George Bush's dog. The general thrust of propaganda gets through, however. When asked to identify the largest element of the federal budget, less than 1/4 give the correct answer: military spending. Almost half select foreign aid, which barely exists; the second choice is welfare, chosen by 1/3 of the population, who also far overestimate the proportion that goes to Blacks and to child support. And though the question was not asked, virtually none are likely to be aware that `defense spending' is in large measure welfare for the rich. Another result of the study is that more educated sectors are more ignorant -- not surprising, since they are the main targets of indoctrination. Bush supporters, who are the best educated, scored lowest overall." - Noam Chomsky * * * "Never let school interfere with your education." - Mark Twain * * * "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both." - James Madison * * * "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments ... the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding ... and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be ... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes pains to prevent it." - Adam Smith * * * "When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard." - Adrienne Rich * * * "It is of great importance that the general public be given the opportunity to experience, consciously and intelligently, the efforts and results of scientific research. It is not sufficient that each result be taken up, elaborated, and applied by few specialists in the field. Restricting the body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a people and leads to spiritual poverty." - Albert Einstein * * * "The greatest problem facing our country is the breaking down into two classes, those who have and those who have not. The growing differences between the incomes of the skilled and the less skilled, the educated and the uneducated, pose a very real danger. If that widening rift continues, we're going to be in terrible trouble. The idea of having a class of people who never communicate with their neighbors - those very neighbors who assume the responsibility for providing their basic needs - is extremely unpleasant and discouraging. And it cannot last. We'll have a civil war. We really cannot remain a democratic, open society that is divided into two classes. In the long run, that's the greatest single danger. And the only way I see to resolve that problem is to improve the quality of education." - Milton Friedman, TECHNOS Quarterly, For Education and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1996 * * * "The major, crucial, overriding problem with schools is that they fail to teach children to read in the first grade. . . . (A)ll Republican and Democratic politicians pontificating about school reform consistently say they want children to be able to read by the third grade. So what are they doing in kindergarten, first and second grades? Spending their time on sex education or playing with computers? "Teaching children to read is not rocket science and it doesn't require expensive equipment, materials or professionals; any parent can teach his child to read with a good $50 phonics system. "...For decades, schoolchildren have been taught to guess at words by looking at the pictures, a fraud called Whole Language. . . . . Of all the injustices that have been perpetrated on minorities, none is as devastating to their chance to live the American dream as keeping them in failing schools for 12 years without teaching them to be good readers." - Phyllis Schlafly * * * "Per-pupil spending has doubled since 1970, after adjusting for inflation, teacher salaries have risen $13,000 in the past decade, and teachers are better qualified than ever before. We've fiddled with curriculum, instructional methods, graduation requirements and school organization. Nothing has worked. Our children stll do worse in international competition than the Jamaican bobsled team...." - Stephan Chapman, Facts and Fictions of Educational Choices, November 4, 1990 * * * "Our schools are supposed to be accountable, but in reality they're accountable only in the way the president is accountable - through slow and clumsy political devices guaranteed to leave many (and often most) people highly dissatisfied. Schools ought to be accountable in the way grocery stores and dry cleaners are accountable - through quick, direct methods that permit a variety of people of different means and desires all to be satisfied at once. "It may sound odd or even callous to think of providing education the way we provide groceries. But if we provided groceries the way we provide education, most of us whould starve. If we want nutritious schools, we need to try something different....: letting parents send their kids to any school they choose at public expense, and requiring schools to attract students or close down." - Stephan Chapman, Facts and Fictions of Educational Choices, November 4, 1990 * * * "Important as education is to the progress of Hispanics in this society, Hispanics' lower achievments in this realm must be placed in some perspective. Hispanics are certainly not the first group whose educational gains have proceeded at a slow pace. Italian Americans, for example, did not achieve educational parity with other groups until 1972 - nearly six decades after the peak of Italian immigration - but now they experience one of the highest rates of educational mobility of any group. Groups do not all advance at precisely the same rate in this society - sometimes because of discrimination, sometimes because of other factors. As Thomas Sowell, and others have pointed out, no multiethnic society in the world exhibits utopian equality of income, education, and occupational status for every one of its ethnic groups. What is important is that opportunities be made available to all persons, regardless of race or ethnicity. Ultimately, however, it will be up to individuals to take advantage of those opportunities. Increasing numbers of Hispanics are doing just that. And no government action can replace motivation and will to succeed that propels genuine individual achievment." - Linda Chavez, Out of the Barrio, 1991 * * * "The question is not whether universities should seek diversity, but what kind of diversity. It seems that the primary form of diversity which universities should try to foster is diversity of mind. Such diversity would enrich academic discourse, widen its parameters, multiply its objects of inquiry, and increase the probability of obscure and unlikely terrain being investigated. Abroad one typically encounters such diversity of opinion even on basich questions such as how society should be organized.... By contrast, most American students seem to display striking agreement on all the basic questions of life. Indeed, they appear to regard a true difference of opinion, based on convictions that are firm and intensely held, as dangerously dogmatic and an offense against the social etiquette of tolerance. Far from challenging these unconventional prejudices, college leaders tend to encourage their uncritical continuation." - Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education, 1991 * * * "It is the fashion these days to say that responsibility for education 'traditionally' rests with the local community - as a prelude to proposing an exception to the tradition in the form of federal aid. This 'tradition,' let us remember, is also the law. It is sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States, for education is one of the powers reserved to the States by the Tenth Amendment. Therefore, any federal aid program, however desirable it might appear, must be regarded as illegal until such time as the Constitution is amended." - Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 1964 * * * "...[Federal aid] promotes the idea that federal school money is 'free' money, and thus gives the people a distorted picture of the cost of education. I was distressed to find that five out of six high school and junior college students recently interviewed in Phoenix said they favored federal aid because it would mean more money for local schools and ease the financial burden on Arizona taxpayers. The truth, of course, is that the federal government has no funds except those it extracts from the taxpayers who resided in the various States. The money that the federal government pays to State X for education has been taken from the citizens of State X in federal taxes and comes back to them, minus the Washington brokerage fee." - Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 1964 * * * "...we have encouraged the teaching profession to be more concerned with how a subject is taught than with what is taught. Most important of all: in our anxiety to 'improve' the world and insure 'progress' we have permitted our schools to beome laboratories for social and economic change according to the predilections of the professional educators. We have forgotten that the proper function of the school is to transmit the cultural heritage of one generation to the next generation, and to so train the minds of the next generation to make them capable of absorbing ancient learning and applying it to the problems of its own day. The fundamental explanations of this distortion of values is that we have forgotten that purpose of education. Of better: we have forgotten for whom education is intended. The function of schools is not to educate, or elevate, society; but rather to educate individuals and to equip them with the knowledge to take care of society's needs. We have forgotten that a society progresses only to the extent that it produces leaders capable of guiding and inspiring progress. And we cannot develop such leaders unless our standards of education are geared to excellence instead of mediocrity. We must give full reign to individual talents, and we must encourage our schools to enforce academic disciplines - to put preponderant emphasis on English, mathmatics, history, literature, foreign languages and the natural sciences. We should look upon our schools - not as a place to train the 'whole character' of the child - a resposibility that properly belongs to his family and church - but to train his mind." - Barry Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 1964 * * * "Citizenship should be placed above everything else, even learning. Is there any college of the land, a chair of citizenship, where good citizenship and all that it implies is taught? There is not one - that is, not one where sane citizenship is taught. There are some which teach insane citzenship, bastard citizenship, but that is all. Patriotism! Yes; but patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest. ... Good citizenship would teach accuracy of thinking and accuracy of statement." - Mark Twain, Speech, May 14, 1908 * * * "Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog." - Mark Twain, speech, November 23, 1900 * * * "I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other." - Mark Twain, 1867 * * * "It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others - and less trouble." - Mark Twain, speech, 1906 * * * "All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten." - Mark Twain, Notebook, 1908 * * * "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." - Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898 * * * "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." - Mark Twain * * * "The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." - Mohammed * * * "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated." - Alec Bourne * * * "If you don't teach people freedom and limited government, you've lost your country and what people came here for." - Rosemarie Avila, 1995 * * * "When I transfer my knowledge, I teach. When I transfer my beliefs, I indoctrinate." - Arthur Danto, Analytic Philosophy of Knowledge, 1968 * * * "It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children." - John Taylor Gatto, 1991 NY State Teacher of the Year * * * "Education is a weapon, whose effectiveness depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." - Joseph Stalin * * * "...in our dream, we have unlimited resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any other children into philosophers or men of learning and science..." - Fredrick Gales of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1913 * * * "If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it away from him. An investment of knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin * * * "Prefer knowledge to wealth, for one is transitory, the other perpetual." - Socrates * * * "It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know." - Henry David Thoreau * * * "It now costs more to amuse a child than it did to educate his father." - Vaughan Monroe * * * "Common sense should tell us that reading is the ultimate weapon - destroying ignorance, poverty and despair before they can destroy us. A nation that doesn't read much doesn't know much. And a nation that doesn't know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. The challenge, therefore, is to convince future generations of children that carrying a book is much more rewarding than carrying a gun." - Jim Trelease, 1995 * * * "I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best - its all they'll take, leaving to others the problems of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money - provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don't need it." - Peter DeVries, 1967 * * * "A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad." - FDR * * * "Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines." - Erich Fromm * * * "You cannot trust the government to educate your children on the value of being free. You have to do it yourself." - Alan Keyes, 2001 * * * "Education is a state-controlled manufacturing of echoes." - Norman Douglas, How About Europe?, 1930 * * * "Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups." - Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, "Education," 1916 * * * "A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people." - James Madison, message to Congress, December 5, 1810 * * * "Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave." - Henry Peter Brougham, speech, January 29, 1828 * * * "Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open." - James Dewar * * * "History becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920 * * * "Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends." - Benjamin Disraeli, speech, June 15, 1874 * * * "Education is the result of contact. A great people is produced by contact with great minds." - Calvin Coolidge, speech, January 21, 1923 * * * "Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence." - Albert Edward Wiggam, The New Decalogue of Science, 1923 * * * "We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought." - Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays, 1928 * * * "You mean we can spend $4 billion a month to keep the military in Iraq, but we can't afford crayons for first-graders?" - John S. Carter * * * – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind * * * – Richard J. Maybury, The Abe Lincoln Hoax * * * "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, Editor Harper's Magazine * * * "A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state." – Isabel Paterson (1886-1961), American Author * * * "Public schools are institutions of coercion. Students are coerced to attend them. Parents are coerced to pay for them." – Gary Reed * * * "The price of a 'free' public education is freedom." – Capitalism.org * * * "We've been thoroughly trained in government institutions where every day for twelve of our most impressionable years we took a loyalty oath before starting our work." - Hal O'Boyle * * * "Public schools are government-established, politician- and bureaucrat-controlled, fully politicized, taxpayer-supported, authoritarian socialist institutions. In fact, the public-school system is one of the purest examples of socialism existing in America." – Thomas L. Johnson * * *