Education Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Learning

"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

"Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is mob rule—incited by demagogues and steered in an unstable manner. German democracy in particular displays traits of a soft totalitarianism, marked by pervasive self-censorship that is often scarcely even recognized as such."

Prof. Hans Hermann Hoppe

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious a hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has."

Malcolm Muggeridge

"'Enemies of science' are not the people who question numbers, studies, and measures, but those who want to suppress open debate about them. Blaming and excluding others may give us psychological relief, but it won’t solve the COVID crisis—which by now is more of a societal crisis than a purely health-related one."

Dr. Alexander Zinn

"To fanciful minds and theoretical speculators, the so-called "science" of modern astronomy furnishes a field, unsurpassed in any science for the unrestrained license of the imagination, and the building up of a complicated conjuration of absurdities such as to overawe the simpleton and make him gape with wonder"

Thomas Winship

"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.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Upton Sinclair

"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

"I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."

John D. Rockefeller

"Competition forces the development of new markets. The goal must be to turn all healthy people into sick people, i.e., people who consider themselves to be in need of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive manipulation by experts, both chemically and psychologically, for as long as possible in order to be able to “live healthily.” This is already working quite well in the area of physical illness, but even better in the area of mental disorders, especially since there is no shortage of theories according to which almost all people are unhealthy. What is questionable is the analogous transfer of the concept of illness from the physical to the psychological. Some examples: a) The sensory organ of fear, responsible for signaling as yet unclear threats, is unpleasant but vitally necessary and therefore perfectly healthy; only the wrong way of dealing with fear (e.g., defense, repression) can make you ill. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, fear was recognized as a market niche and a number of new, independent disease entities were constructed – with many wonderful healing possibilities for grateful patients."

Klaus Dörner

"Everyone has the right to make his own decisions, but none has the right to force his decision on others."

Ayn Rand

"The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't."

Sam Harris

"I would abolish the German school system, fire all school principals and administrative officials, and reinvent it with the help of people who know what they are talking about. The existing system—with a few notable exceptions—kills the spirit of teachers, destroys the minds and souls of children, and spreads fear and anxiety among parents, who feel compelled to push their children even though everything speaks against it. The existing system serves neither the state (states) nor the people who work there every day. It can only be described as an economic, cultural, intellectual, and human disaster. I am waiting for the day when German parents have had enough and have the courage to stand up for their children"

Jesper Juul

"There are two histories: the official history, the false one that is taught, the history ‘ad usum delphini’; and then the secret history, which reveals the true causes of events, a shameful history."

Honoré de Balzac

"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 just two sentences, Orwell reveals the institutional structure of the media. He asks: Why is there such censorship? It is partly because the press is owned by wealthy people who want only certain topics to reach the public. And secondly, Orwell says, everyone who goes through the elite education system, attending the "right" schools, learns that there are certain things you must not say and certain thoughts you must not think. This is the role elite institutions play in socialization. Those who do not conform are usually expelled. These two sentences basically say it all."

George Orwell

"Dismissing ideas that you dislike isn’t critical thinking. It’s confirmation bias.

Critical thinking is approaching new information with a mix of curiosity and doubt.

It starts with gauging the credibility of the source, the rigor of the logic, and the validity of the evidence."

Adam Grant