Education Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Learning

"Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor."

John Taylor Gatto

"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

"You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill."

John Taylor Gatto

"Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know nothing about, and having those strangers work on your child's mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years? Could there be a more radical idea than that? Back in Colonial days in America, if you proposed that kind of idea, they'd burn you at the stake, you mad person! It's a mad idea!"

John Taylor Gatto

"I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience."

John Taylor Gatto

"If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it."

Neil Postman

"I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"

Richard P. Feynman

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

Alvin Toffler

"The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions."

John Taylor Gatto

"The first bachelor generation is just climbing the university chairs. People who are perfectly trained in their craft, who have internalized the hegemonic ideology, and who are good advertising media for a system that needs academic confirmation in order to be able to continue to say 'democracy'. This generation already determines what 'good science' is. It fills journals, conference programs, and so eventually textbooks, lectures, and seminars - with topics, perspectives, and terms it has taken from the political agenda and the tenders linked to it, and which it doesn't question because it couldn't learn that anywhere."

Michael Meyen

"Ideally, every child throughout their entire schooling should be repeatedly told: "You are being indoctrinated. We have yet to develop an education system that is not an indoctrination system. We are sorry, but this is the best we can do. What is taught here is a mixture of common prejudices and the decisions of this particular culture. The slightest glance at history shows how unstable these must be. You are taught by people who were able to fit into a thought pattern set by their predecessors. It is a self-sustaining system. Those among you who are more robust and individual than others are encouraged to leave the classroom and find ways to educate yourselves – to form your own judgments. Those who stay must constantly remember that they are being shaped and patterned to fit the narrow and special needs of this particular society.""

Doris Lessing

"In the school system, they don’t want us to learn about money, because they just want to pump out good employees that do what they’re told. If you look at school, it’s opposite of what it takes to be successful. In real life: ‘don’t make a mistake’, ‘do as you’re told’, ‘take tests by yourself’, ‘don’t cooperate’, ‘do it by yourself’, ‘do it alone’, ‘there’s only one right answer’… No, there’s tons of answers to a problem. So you come out of school scared to death of making a mistake, you do everything on your own, you don’t cooperate, there’s no synergy, there’s no brainstorming. So I think, people come out of school paralyzed. I think the school system is criminal in that it kills a child’s spirit of learning. A child goes into school all excited, ‘Oh, I’m gonna learn and it’s gonna be great’, and then, the teacher says ‘Sit down and shut up, don’t talk, we don’t care what you’re interested in’"

Kim Kiyosaki

"Mich irritiert stets, dass sie in Wahrheit gar keine Schulen sind. Wir sehen keine Orte für das Leben und das Lernen, sondern Kasernen. An langen Fluren steht ein Raum neben dem anderen stramm. Alle Klassenzimmer haben dieselbe Form. Die Kinder werden hineingepfercht, alle nach vorne zur Tafel ausgerichtet. Der Lehrer schreibt an, die Kinder schreiben ab. Das ist eine industrielle Anordnung, der die Massenabfüllung als Idee zugrunde liegt."

Peter Hübner

"What good is it for a person to learn to read and write if they leave the thinking to others?"

Ernst R. Hauschka

"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

Hannah Arendt

"School is a sophisticated means of control by the state, created (or usurped from similar approaches by competing entities—churches, cities, private individuals) to accustom all citizens to obedience from childhood, to instill in them the suggestion of the necessity of the state, to nip any idea of emancipation in the bud, to steer the development of their thinking into well-maintained channels, and to drill them into comfortably governable, humble subjects."

Walter Borgius

"The moment the monster state lays its paws on the field of education and instruction, the goal of the best possible physical and mental development of the child disappears and the bare power interest of the state in the chastisement of obedient, submissive and reverent subjects becomes the decisive authority."

Walter Borgius

"In schools, children learn above all to accept the system, to work for paper money, and not to question the government. They do not learn to make peace, to forgive, to be helpful to all people, and certainly not wisdom.
It is a breeding ground for training the future workhorses of the elites to be puppets loyal to the system."

Matthias Lubos