Quotes about school and education (2644 quotes, page 27)

“I want to be a lawyer. I want to go to law school.
Towards the end of [the] trial I’m like, ‘I want to go against corrupt piece of shit prosecutors like Thomas Binger and put them in their place and make sure they never practice law again.”

Kyle Rittenhouse (2003) former suspect in the killing of two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin

Source: 7 December 2021 video interview https://rumble.com/vqd1hv-kyle-rittenhouse-reveals-he-plans-to-become-a-lawyer.html with Elijah Schaffer and Sydney Watson of Blaze TV reported by Gino Spocchi of The Independent https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-blasts-piece-trial-183634529.html

Law

“When the school children of Australia are told more truths about their own country, and fewer lies about the virtues of Royalty, the day will be near when we can place our own national flag in one of the proudest places among the ensigns of the world.”

Henry Lawson (1867–1922) Australian writer and poet

Source: A Neglected History (1887)

Country , Children , Truth , World

“School was designed to get you to fall in line and get a job in someone else’s company.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

“Our world is fundamentally different from the one we were taught about in school.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

World

“School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
Source: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers (2013) p. xxii

Children , Thinking , Training

“The idea of schooling free men in anything would have revolted Athenians. Forced training was for slaves. Among free men, learning was self-discipline, not the gift of experts.”

John Taylor Gatto book The Underground History of American Education

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (2001), p. 62

Learning , Men , Training , Idea

“This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 100

Food , Personality , Children

“Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 23

Behavior

“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.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 19

Learning

“Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. xxxvi

Education

“A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people—and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

The Exhausted School: Bending The Bars of Traditional Education, Berkeley Hills Books; 2 edition (2002) p. 53

People

“Changin' laws an' legislatures ain't, as fur as I can see,
Goin' to make this world much better, unless somehow we can
Find a way to make a better an' a finer sort o' man.
The trouble ain't with statutes or with systems—not at all;
It's with humans jus' like we [are] an' their petty ways an' small.
We could stop our writin' law-books an' our regulatin' rules
If a better sort of manhood was the product of our schools.
For the things that we air needin' isn't writin' from a pen
Or bigger guns to shoot with, but a bigger type of men.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: All That Matters (1922), p.57 - The Need, from stanzas 1 (part) and 2.

Men , Books , World , Law

“The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn, and it isn't supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn't made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that's where real meaning is found, that is the classroom's lesson, however indirectly delivered.”

John Taylor Gatto book The Underground History of American Education

Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (2001), pp. 105-106

Fashion , Life , Children , Learning

“By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling—teacher colleges, textbook publishers, materials suppliers, and others—have ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 85

Children , Teachers , Education

“Mass schooling damages children. We don’t need any more of it. And under the guise that it is the same thing as education, it has been picking our pockets just as Socrates predicted it would thousands of years ago. One of the surest ways to recognize real education is by the fact that it doesn’t cost very much, doesn’t depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the Mass schooling that propels it are nearly free. It is hard to turn a dollar on education. But schooling is a wonderful hustle, getting sharper all the time.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 70

Dependency , Children , Education , Time

“The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 22

Home , Children , People , Training

“Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. 6

Mountain , Secret , World , Time

“I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us... I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv

Dependency , Nature , Thinking , Children

“Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

John Taylor Gatto book Dumbing Us Down

Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992), p. xxxiv

Dependency , Children , Learning , Age

“How much more evidence is necessary? Good schools don’t need more money or a longer year; they need real free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need and runs risks. We don’t need a national curriculum, or national testing either. Both initiatives arise from ignorance of how people learn, or deliberate indifference to it.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)

Money , People , Learning , Indifference

“Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents... The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)

Childhood , Home , History , Idea

“I’ve taught public school for 26 years but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think. I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)

Hurt , Dependency , Understanding , Indifference

“When American schooling stopped being primary for mental development and character training,.. it became a training ground to supply the existing economy with a particular kind of labor and customers that it needed. One buried byproduct of this shift was to sabotage free market principles. Because by conditioning children to what is, instead of what could be, it heavily subsidized existed commerce and social political dispositions.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: “A Different Kind of Teacher: Nobody can educate you except yourself,” C-SPAN (January 5, 2001) https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4653000/educate-yourself

Training , Children

“My opinion is that the best law is an education of quality, that begins in the family, grows at school and finds in society a stimulus for the formation of people. We are greatly lacking in civic friendship, we look at one another as mad people and not as brethren or as people who share the same ideal, the same purpose.”

Ricardo Ezzati (1942) archbishop and cardinal

Source: Chile – Cardinal Ezzati: Reparation Eucharist https://www.infoans.org/en/sections/news/item/1167-chile-cardinal-ezzati-reparation-eucharist-at-gratitud-nacionain-this-l (13 June 2016)

Friendship , People , Education , Madness

“Most physicists enjoy the outdoors. They are mushroom gatherers, bird watchers, hikers, amateur mountaineers whose idea of weekend relaxation is to climb a mountain. Several physics summer schools and research centers are located in or near mountainous areas. I have not seen such uniform recreational impulses in other professions, an observation which prompts speculation on the connection between the nature of inquiry in physics and mountain climbing.”

Heinz R. Pagels (1939–1988) American physicist

Source: The Cosmic Code (1982), p. 271

Mountain , Idea , Nature , Bird

“You cannot love persons you don't know. That's why we have to work on the schools and the universities to educate young generation to dialogue.”

Paul Youssef Matar (1941)

Source: Ecumenical and Inter-religious Dialogue by The Maronite Archbishop of Beirut Paul Youssef Matar https://onevoicechristians.org/videos (2019)

Personality , Universe , Education , Love

“Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out what I could of all desire;
I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"The Sententious Man," ll. 31-36
Words for the Wind (1958)

Pain

“We must work together to create an America where everyone feels safe in their community, where children feel safe in their schools. And, of course, that responsibility that we collectively have to ensure that all people feel safe in their community is what brings us together today.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2022, May 2022
Source: Remarks by President Biden and Vice President Harris at Signing of Executive Order to Advance Effective, Accountable Policing and Strengthen Public Safety (May 25, 2022) https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/05/25/remarks-by-president-biden-and-vice-president-harris-at-signing-of-executive-order-to-advance-effective-accountable-policing-and-strengthen-public-safety/

Children , People , Communication , Feeling

“Puzzled frowns in the audience. Science reporters they might be, but high school chemistry was going a bit too deep for most.”

Gregory Benford book The Sunborn

Part II, Chapter 4, “Disbelief” (p. 104)
The Sunborn (2005)

Science

“In China, literally in elementary school, we have to sit a certain way. You can't raise your hand anytime, you can’t speak in class. So, it takes a lot of courage and experimenting to kind of try to break that.”

Fala Chen (1982) Hong Kong actress

"Fala Chen Came to America to Find Herself—And Wound Up Being Cast in a Groundbreaking Marvel Movie" in Harpers Bazaar https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a37711969/fala-chen-shang-chi-and-the-legend-of-the-ten-rings/ (24 September 2021)

Courage , Way

“I like to encourage students to reach for the stars and go for their dreams. I tell them not to be afraid to pursue something different. I also tell them that it's very important to read as much and as often as they can and to work hard in school.”

Gary Locke (1950) American politician

"Questions and Answers for the Governor" https://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/governorlocke/kids/questions.htm

Star , Reading , Dreams

“The Church works for the proclamation and the complaint, in order to live in peace. This task begins in the family, which is the first school, and where there should be no violence. We must be agents of life, respectful of people, diversity and the environment.”

Héctor Epalza Quintero (1940–2021) priest

The Bishop of Buenaventura: "Solving the problem of violence with social investment" http://www.fides.org/en/news/33074-AMERICA_COLOMBIA_The_Bishop_of_Buenaventura_Solving_the_problem_of_violence_with_social_investment (17 January 2013)

People , Family , Peace , Life

“Our main concern now is to bring peace to the hearts of the people. Schools have an important role in this since classes have children of different ethnic groups and this is where they can be educated to live side by side.”

Angelo Moreschi (1952–2020) Italian Catholic Bishop

Slowly Calm Returns to Gambella After Fierce Ethnic Clashes. Concern for 16,000 People in Flight Towards Sudan http://www.fides.org/en/news/1553-AFRICA_ETHIOPIA_SLOWLY_CALM_RETURNS_TO_GAMBELLA_AFTER_FIERCE_ETHNIC_CLASHES_CONCERN_FOR_16_000_PEOPLE_IN_FLIGHT_TOWARDS_SUDAN (20 January 2004)

Children , People , Education , Peace

“Our Lord has many weak children in His family, many dull pupils in His school, many raw soldiers in His army, and many lame sheep in His flock. Yet He bears with them all, and casts none away.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Vol. III, John XX: 24–31, p. 406
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: St. John (1865–1873)

Family , Children

“After I finished school, I started to get in touch with the referee's work. After all, I grew up in this circle and felt that the referee's job was more interesting, so I slowly decided that the referee's work was my future direction.”

Chen Ruolin (1992) Chinese diver

"从跳台女皇转身裁判席，陈若琳对跳水造星难有了更深的体会" http://m.thepaper.cn/kuaibao_detail.jsp?contid=3109243&from=kuaibao

Future

“Catechesis must be experiential, a true accompaniment in the experience of God, not a schooled catechesis where only an indoctrination or a teaching of knowledge is received.”

Franco Coppola (1957) Italian bishop and apostolic nuncio

Women, the poor and young: the main challenges of the Mexican Church http://www.fides.org/en/news/66127-AMERICA_MEXICO_Women_the_poor_and_young_the_main_challenges_of_the_Mexican_Church (3 June 2019)

Knowledge , God

“We haven't [helped pay for schools, roads and even day care centers]. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?”

Patty Murray (1950) United States senator from Washington

Quoted in December 2002 http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/100835_murray20.shtml

People , Help

“If you were there behind every family's closed doors, everyone's a little wacko. Chances are that your family is no weirder than the next family, or than the other girl at school's family. Everyone can be quirky at times, and I embrace that, personally.”

Meaghan Martin (1992) American musician and actor

Seventeen Chats With Meaghan Martin From 10 Things I Hate About You! https://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/reviews/a5306/meaghan-martin-talks-camp-rock-2/ (July 27, 2009)

Family , Chance , Time , Girl

“What reliable information can a traitor who has only completed two years of high-school education provide?”

Aslan Maskhadov (1951–2005) Chechen warlord

In a disparaging reference to pro-Moscow then Chechen First Deputy Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov
"Chechen Leader Gives Exclusive Interview To RFE/RL" https://www.rferl.org/a/1057844.html (7 March 2005)

Education