Quotes about school and education
page 8

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George Steiner photo
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Francis S. Collins photo
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Louis Althusser photo
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Guido Ceronetti photo

“Today medical school is attended by mobs, not students; a mob receives its degree, a Doctor-Mob practises the medical profession. We learn to distrust it immediately; this mob may even be armed, may even be equipped with powerful weapons. Whoever wishes to become a doctor should reflect before entering the profession; enter only if you are determined to be different and to adopt different principles and teachings. Otherwise do not enter.”

Guido Ceronetti (1927–2018) Italian poet, writer, journalist and translator

The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine (II silenzio del corpo: Materiali per studio di medicina, 1979), translated by Michael Moore, in The Body in the Library: A Literary Anthology of Modern Medicine, London and New York: Verso, 2003, p. 296 https://books.google.it/books?id=iFRwpEpgCKUC&pg=PA296.

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“Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

The Spectator 15 April 2000
2000s, 2000

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“I honestly wasn't paying attention in school when I was told the story of Moses. Some of the details of his life are extraordinary.”

Ridley Scott (1937) English film director and film producer

Esquire interview (2012)

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Michael Vassar photo

“I taught at a school in Cincinnati with a 0% graduation rate and that was also interesting so I updated from thinking school was beneficial for other people but not beneficial to me, to thinking school was beneficial for maybe some people around the middle – at least some of the better schools – but not beneficial for the vast majority of people, to then actually reading the literature on education and on intelligence and academic accomplishment and symbolic manipulation and concluding "no, school isn't good for anyone". There might be a few schools that are good for people, like there's Blair and there's Stuyvesant and these schools may actually teach people, but school can better be seen as a vaccination program against knowledge than a process for instilling knowledge in people, and of course when a vaccination program messes up, occasionally people get sick and die of the mumps or smallpox or whatever. And when school messes up occasionally people get sick and educated and they lose biological fitness. And in either case the people in charge revise the program and try to make sure that doesn't happen again, but in the case of school they also use that as part of their positive branding and you know maintain a not-very-plausible story about it being intended to cause that effect while also working hard to make sure that doesn't happen again.”

Michael Vassar (1979) President of the Singularity Institute

In an interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSG0p-uflA with Adam Ford, December 2012

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“I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer: Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates 1988" http://www.pritzkerprize.com/bunnei.htm#...about%20Oscar%20Niemeyer, pritzkerprize.com (1988).

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“English: "… the transformation of the educational system which is already ongoing. All prima— precary schools will be eliminated."”

Carlos Menem (1930) Argentine politician who was President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999

"… la transformación del sistema educativo que ya está en marcha. Se eliminarán totalmente las escuelas prima— precarias."
Actos fallidos de Políticos en YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkuoHwqcldA.

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“I warn my hon. Friends…that once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1969/mar/05/defence in the House of Commons (5 March 1969).
1960s

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Mobutu Sésé Seko photo

“After half a lifetime of poking fun at Bernard Shaw's materialism Kingsmill was not above touching the despised sage for ten quid. Even in the Australian school of literary morals, we weren't allowed to slag a man and put the bit on him simultaneously: it had to be one or the other.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Richard Ingrams at Doubting Castle'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

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“I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) American evangelical pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator

America Can Be Saved! (1979) Sword of the Lord Publishers, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, p. 52-53, quoted at "The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party" http://www.theocracywatch.org/schools2.htm

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“You know, I went to a Catholic school as a kid but no one did anything to me. Maybe I wasn't good-looking enough.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

The Daily Mail, "Chris Hemsworth takes a swipe at Tony Abbott for shocking gaffe where former PM described himself as being not 'good-looking enough' to be a victim of child abuse" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-4964572/Chris-Hemsworth-slams-Tony-Abbott-child-abuse-gaffe.html, October 10, 2017
2014

“What is happening now in Yemen is simply a repeat: ministers are also escaping accountability for their involvement in consistent Saudi attacks on civilian targets such as schools and hospitals – using similar rockets to those supplied to Iraq in the 1960s.”

Mark Curtis (British author) British journalist and historian

For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/british-political-elite-invasion-iraq-never-happened-435103022 (19 March 2018), Middle East Eye.

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“I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.Therefore, what seems to me a legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture. I would point out to you that the word "holy" means "set apart," and that it is not against our tradition to be, in fact, "set apart." You can look in the Old Testament, you can look at Christian history. You will see that there were times when those who had our beliefs were definitely in the minority and it was a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated.What I mean by separation is, for example, what the homeschoolers have done. Faced with public school systems that no longer educate but instead "condition" students with the attitudes demanded by Political Correctness, they have seceded. They have separated themselves from public schools and have created new institutions, new schools, in their homes.”

Paul Weyrich (1942–2008) American political activist

Letter to Amy Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research http://www.nationalcenter.org/Weyrich299.html (1999-02-16)

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“Auschwitz existed within history, not outside of it. The main lesson I learned there is simple: We Jews should never, ever become like our tormentors … Since 1967 it has become obvious that political Zionism has one monolithic aim: Maximum land in Palestine with a minimum of Palestinians on it. This aim is pursued with an inexcusable cruelty as demonstrated during the assault on Gaza. The cruelty is explicitly formulated in the Dahiye doctrine of the military and morally supported by the Holocaust religion.I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of "blood and soil" in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people -- coerced ghettoization behind a "security wall"; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival -- force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.”

Hajo Meyer (1924–2014) Dutch physicist

" An Ethical Tradition Betrayed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hajo-meyer/an-ethical-tradition-betr_b_438660.html," huffingtonpost.com, Jan. 27, 2010. Retrieved on March 27, 2010.

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“All education is a struggle," said Marchbanks. "I had to struggle against schools and universities, of course, in order to get time to educate myself, which I did magnificently.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Introduction.
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (1985)

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“I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother.”

Jim Clyburn (1940) American politician

[27 February 2005, http://clyburn.house.gov/statements/050227voucherplan.html, "Governor's Plan Seems Unconstitutional and Unconscionable", Representative Jim Clyburn, United States House of Representatives, 2007-07-24]

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“It is known that the mathematics prescribed for the high school [Gymnasien] is essentially Euclidean, while it is modern mathematics, the theory of functions and the infinitesimal calculus, which has secured for us an insight into the mechanism and laws of nature. Euclidean mathematics is indeed, a prerequisite for the theory of functions, but just as one, though he has learned the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs, will not thereby be enabled to read a Latin author much less to appreciate the beauties of a Horace, so Euclidean mathematics, that is the mathematics of the high school, is unable to unlock nature and her laws. Euclidean mathematics assumes the completeness and invariability of mathematical forms; these forms it describes with appropriate accuracy and enumerates their inherent and related properties with perfect clearness, order, and completeness, that is, Euclidean mathematics operates on forms after the manner that anatomy operates on the dead body and its members.
On the other hand, the mathematics of variable magnitudes—function theory or analysis—considers mathematical forms in their genesis. By writing the equation of the parabola, we express its law of generation, the law according to which the variable point moves. The path, produced before the eyes of the 113 student by a point moving in accordance to this law, is the parabola.
If, then, Euclidean mathematics treats space and number forms after the manner in which anatomy treats the dead body, modern mathematics deals, as it were, with the living body, with growing and changing forms, and thus furnishes an insight, not only into nature as she is and appears, but also into nature as she generates and creates,—reveals her transition steps and in so doing creates a mind for and understanding of the laws of becoming. Thus modern mathematics bears the same relation to Euclidean mathematics that physiology or biology … bears to anatomy. But it is exactly in this respect that our view of nature is so far above that of the ancients; that we no longer look on nature as a quiescent complete whole, which compels admiration by its sublimity and wealth of forms, but that we conceive of her as a vigorous growing organism, unfolding according to definite, as delicate as far-reaching, laws; that we are able to lay hold of the permanent amidst the transitory, of law amidst fleeting phenomena, and to be able to give these their simplest and truest expression through the mathematical formulas”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 37.

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“In its origins the utility school was strongly influenced by a desire to strengthen the potentially apologetic character of economics.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Source: A History of Economic Thought (1939), Chapter VIII, Modern Economics, p. 370

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“Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. It is taken as axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention. … The nation had to be strong to repel invasion, strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of the propertied and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied and improvident from ever using the government to secure their own prosperity at the expense of moneyed capital. … No one suggests that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of the Articles and labored so weightily over a new instrument not because the nation was failing under the Articles, but because it was succeeding only too well. Without intervention from the leaders, reconstruction threatened in time to turn the new nation into an agrarian and proletarian democracy. … All we know is that at a time when the current of political progress was in the direction of agrarian and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation and imposed upon it a powerful form against which it was never to succeed in doing more than blindly struggle. The liberating virus of the Revolution was definitely expunged, and henceforth if it worked at all it had to work against the State, in opposition to the armed and respectable power of the nation.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

¶13. Published under "The Development of the American State," The State https://mises.org/library/state (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 1998), pp. 33–34.
"The State" (1918), II

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“My dad said, "What the heck is software?" and my mom said, "Why would a person ever need a computer?" They said, "OK, OK, we hear you, but if it doesn't work out, you'll go back to business school right?"”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

And I said "Right," and I never came back.
CNBC: "How Steve Ballmer went from making $50,000 a year as an assistant at Microsoft to becoming a billionaire" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/27/billionaire-steve-ballmer-started-out-making-only-50000-at-microsoft.html (27 July 2018)
2010s

“We are so accustomed to hear arithmetic spoken of as one of the three fundamental ingredients in all schemes of instruction, that it seems like inquiring too curiously to ask why this should be. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—these three are assumed to be of co-ordinate rank. Are they indeed co-ordinate, and if so on what grounds?
In this modern “trivium” the art of reading is put first. Well, there is no doubt as to its right to the foremost place. For reading is the instrument of all our acquisition. It is indispensable. There is not an hour in our lives in which it does not make a great difference to us whether we can read or not. And the art of Writing, too; that is the instrument of all communication, and it becomes, in one form or other, useful to us every day. But Counting—doing sums,—how often in life does this accomplishment come into exercise? Beyond the simplest additions, and the power to check the items of a bill, the arithmetical knowledge required of any well-informed person in private life is very limited. For all practical purposes, whatever I may have learned at school of fractions, or proportion, or decimals, is, unless I happen to be in business, far less available to me in life than a knowledge, say, of history of my own country, or the elementary truths of physics. The truth is, that regarded as practical arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic have no right to be classed together as co-ordinate elements of education; for the last of these is considerably less useful to the average man or woman not only than the other two, but than 267 many others that might be named. But reading, writing, and such mathematical or logical exercise as may be gained in connection with the manifestation of numbers, have a right to constitute the primary elements of instruction. And I believe that arithmetic, if it deserves the high place that it conventionally holds in our educational system, deserves it mainly on the ground that it is to be treated as a logical exercise. It is the only branch of mathematics which has found its way into primary and early education; other departments of pure science being reserved for what is called higher or university instruction. But all the arguments in favor of teaching algebra and trigonometry to advanced students, apply equally to the teaching of the principles or theory of arithmetic to schoolboys. It is calculated to do for them exactly the same kind of service, to educate one side of their minds, to bring into play one set of faculties which cannot be so severely or properly exercised in any other department of learning. In short, relatively to the needs of a beginner, Arithmetic, as a science, is just as valuable—it is certainly quite as intelligible—as the higher mathematics to a university student.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 267-268.

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

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