School Quotes – Insights and Reflections on Education

"I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me."

Alan Kay

"We've bought into the idea that education is about training and "success," defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death."

Chris Hedges

"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Children are taught in their geography books, when too young to apprehend aright the meaning of such things, that the world is a great globe revolving around the Sun, and the story is repeated continuously, year by year, till they reach maturity, at which time they generally become so absorbed in other matters as to be indifferent as to whether the teaching be true or not, and, as they hear of nobody contradicting it, they presume that it must be the correct thing, if not to believe at least to receive it as a fact. They thus tacitly give their assent to a theory which, if it had first been presented to them at what are called ‘years of discretion,’ they would at once have rejected. The consequences of evil-teaching, whether in religion or in science, are far more disastrous than is generally supposed, especially in a luxurious laisser faire age like our own. The intellect becomes weakened and the conscience seared."

David Wardlaw Scott

"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

"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

"The state school system is a military system, modeled on and implemented from Prussian militarism. It is a chain of command from the government to the minister of education to the state secretary to the school inspector to the principal to the teacher to the student. The order: to implement the curriculum prescribed from above. This is a kind of state terror, intellectual terror."

Axel Burkart