Education Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Learning

"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."

John Taylor Gatto

"As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed."

John Taylor Gatto

"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned."

John Taylor Gatto

"Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid."

John Taylor Gatto

"School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group."

Neil Postman

"The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking."

Henry Ford

"Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination."

Thomas Sowell

"Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields."

Thomas Sowell

"School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes."

John Taylor Gatto

"The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his is a twofold job: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist."

Edward Bernays

"Learning is like rowing against the current. As soon as you stop, you drift back."

Laotse

"A man's real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life."

Henry Ford

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young."

Henry Ford

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

Ivan Illich

"The pupil is ... 'schooled' to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new."

Ivan Illich

"School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught. Once this lesson is learned, people lose their incentive to grow in independence; they no longer find relatedness attractive, and close themselves off to the surprises which life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition."

Ivan Illich

"Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags."

Ivan Illich

"Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation."

Ivan Illich