Education Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Learning

"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

"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense."

Robert G. Ingersoll

"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens."

Henry Louis Mencken

"The problem is not people being educated. The problem is that they are educated just enough to believe what they've been taught, but not educated enough to question what they've been taught."

Unbekannter Autor

"The wise learn from everything and everyone; the average learn from their own experiences; the foolish think they already know better."

Sokrates

"It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles."

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

"The well-known school critic and teacher John Taylor Gatto identifies seven lessons as the real teachings of school:

Confusing the student
Awakening class consciousness
Teaching indifference
Creating intellectual and emotional dependence
Weakening self-confidence
and Accustoming students to constant supervision.

"School condemns most people to being lowly building blocks in a pyramidal social model. In collaboration with television, schooling robs children of the time they need to develop a unique personality, thereby preventing them from growing up. School has replaced the ‘family curriculum’ with the components of privacy, independence, and social life. In its place has come the factory school, a prison for children's souls that fragments social relationships into networks and cannot be survived without damage."

"It replaces the intellectual growth of children with the violent creation of subjects.
It kills the curiosity of its subjects, places them in a dense fog of confusion from which many will never be able to free themselves in their entire lives, it blocks their path to individual freedom and denies them the fulfillment that comes with a free spirit.""

John Taylor Gatto

"The most 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 everywhere else."

Henry Louis Mencken

"In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse."

Edward Bernays

"School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

Ivan Illich

"Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching."

Neil Postman

"Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."

Neil Postman

"Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods."

Neil Postman

"Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration."

Allan Bloom

"Knowledge is the acquiring of facts, understanding is the interpreting of facts, wisdom the application."

Edwin Louis Cole

"Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines."

Erich Fromm

"A great teacher is not the one who gives answers, but the one who ignites curiosity."

Unbekannt