“Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.”

—  Ivan Illich

We the People interview (1996)
Context: The latent function of schooling, that is, the hidden curriculum, which forms individuals into needy people who know that they have now satisfied a little bit of their needs for education, is much more important... The idea that people are born with needs, that needs can be translated into rights, that these rights can be translated into entitlements, is a development of the modem world and it's reasonable, it's acceptable, it's obvious only for people who have had some of their educational needs awakened or created, then satisfied, and then learned that they have less than others. Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.

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Ivan Illich 66
austrian philosopher and theologist 1926–2002

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“Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Einstein did write this quote in "On Education" from 1936, which appeared in Out of My Later Years, but it was not his own original quip, he attributed it to an unnamed "wit".
Very popular in French: "La culture est ce qui reste lorsque l’on a tout oublié" (Culture is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything). Attributed in French to Édouard Herriot (1872-1957) and, in English, sometimes to Ortega y Gasset. Another French variant is "la culture est ce qui reste lorsqu'on a oublié toutes les choses apprises" (Culture is that which remains if one has forgotten everything one has learned), which appears in the 1912 book Propos Critiques by Georges Duhamel, p. 14 http://books.google.com/books?id=Xpk_AAAAIAAJ&q=%22la+culture+est+ce+qui+reste+lorsqu%27on+a+oubli%C3%A9+toutes+les+choses+apprises%22#search_anchor. And another English variant is "Culture is that which remains with a man when he has forgotten all he has learned" which appears in The Living Age: Volume 335 from 1929, p. 159 http://books.google.com/books?id=tHFRAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Culture+is+that+which+remains+with+a+man+when+he+has+forgotten+all+he+has+learned%22#search_anchor, where it is attributed to "Edouard Herriot, French Minister of Education". Another English variant is "Education is that which remains behind when all we have learned at school is forgotten", which appears in The Education Outlook, vol. 60 p. 532 http://books.google.com/books?id=dNcgAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA1-PA532#v=onepage&q=%22education%20is%20that%20which%20remains%22&f=false (from an issue dated 2 December 1907), where it is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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