They work to pass, not to know: and outraged science takes her revenge. They do pass and they don’t know.
Thomas Huxley

This and the following quotes are from
The Freethinkers Guide to the Educational Universe
A selection of Quotations on Education complied by Professor Roland Meighan
Educational Heretics Press

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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

W. B. Yeats

When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling

John Taylor Gatto

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

George Bernard Shaw

Education is a weapon, whose effects depend on who holds it in his hand and at whom it is aimed.

Joseph Stalin

The boy must be transformed into the man; in this school he must not only learn to obey, but must thereby acquire a basis for commanding later. He must learn to be silent not only when he is justly blamed, but must also learn, when necessary, to bear injustice in silence.

Adolf Hitler

The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms

Charles Handy

The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.

Plato

Much of our expenditure on teachers and plant is wasted by attempting to teach people what they do not want to learn in a situation that they would rather not be involved in.

Cohn Ward

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.

John Taylor Gatto

Nobody grew taller by being measured.

Philip Gammage

When I was teaching in school, a man came to a parents’ meeting and complained about the extraordinary mount of testing we were doing. His words went right to the heart of the matter: “You’re like a gardener who constantly pulls his plants up by the roots to see if they’re growing.”

John Holt

No teacher ever said: ‘Don’t value uncertainty and tentativeness, don’t question questions, above all don’t think!’ The message is communicated quietly, insidiously, relentlessly and efficiently through the structure of the classroom: through the role of the teacher, the role of the student, ... the ‘doings’ that are praised or censured.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Bertrand Russell

...schools ain’t what they used to be and never was!

Will Rogers

Schools could become as obsolete as steam trains or paddle steamers.

C. Everett

School is the Army for kids. Adults make them go there, and when they get there, adults tell them what to do, bribe and threaten them into doing it, and punish them when they don’t.

John Holt

The army ... will be the last and highest school of patriotic education.

Adolf Hitler

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

George Bernard Shaw

Home-schoolers as a rule have no quarrel with teachers. My own parents are both teachers; I’ve seen a lot of work that teachers do, on their own time and out of their own pockets

Our reservations are about the system of schooling~. not the people who are doing their best within it.

British Columbia Home-schooler

Do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time.

Old Hebrew Proverb

From my earliest memories of school (going back some 60 years) right up to the present, I am struck by how recurrent are the standard complaints and how little things change. Students are still locked into classrooms, still chained to desks, still herded through lessons that are far from reality and cruelly indifferent to individual differences in brains, background, talent and feelings.

Gene Lehman

Obedient children go willingly to the trenches.

Arthur Acton

Whatever their claims, schools are training most young people to be habitually subservient.

Chris Shute

Education is indoctrination, if you are white - subjugation if you are black.

James Baldwin

Of my two ‘handicaps’, being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.

Shirley Chisholm

We can no more ordain learning by order, coercion and commandment than we can produce love by rape or threat.

Peter Jones

American kids like watching violence on TV and in the movies because violence is being done to them, both at school and at home. It builds up a tremendous amount of anger... The problem is not violence on TV. That’s a symptom... The real problem is the violence of anti-life, unaffectionate, and punitive homes, and disempowering, deadening compulsory schooling, all presented with an uncomprehending smile.

Jerry Mintz

Every dogma must have its day.

Carolyn Wells

The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought to foster the wish for the truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

Bertrand Russell

Thousands of caring, humane people work in schools, as teachers, and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. 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

John Taylor Gatto

Children are people; they grow into tomorrow only as they live today.

John Dewey

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children’s conversations, motion, merriment

are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, ... are prohibited.

Tolstoy

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the prison warders and the governor.

George Bernard Shaw

We no longer have to force-feed education to children: they live in a world in which they are surrounded by educative resources. There are around 500 hours each of the schools’ television and radio every year in this country. There are several million books in public libraries. There are museums in every town. There is a constant flow of cheap or free information from a dozen media. There are home computers which are easily connected to phones and thus other computers...There are thousands of workplaces... There are... the old, the disabled, the very young all in need of children in their lives, all in need of the kind of help caring and careful youngsters can give, and all of them enriched sources of information about the world, and freely available to any child who isn’t locked away in school.

Richard North

The justification for school in its present form no longer exists.

Philip Toogood

Deep in my bones I remain convinced that ultimately it will be the deschoolers who are proved right, and that far in the future our descendants will view the whole concept of the school with mirth and disbelief.

Gerald Haigh

We may get our way but we don’t get their learning. They may have to comply but they won’t change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills off the will to learn.

Charles handy

It used to worry me that, as a teacher, I was engaged in what was essentially microscopic fascism.

Chris Shute

Many parents I know put more hours into their golf games, or their wardrobes, or into accumulating enough capital for the purchase of unnecessary luxuries, than into their child’s education. Because they are still children themselves, it simply does not occur to them to take an active role in their children’s learning

David Guterson

There must be in the world many parents who, like the present author, have young children whom they are anxious to educate as well as possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of existing educational institutions.

Bertrand Russell

Getting it wrong is part of getting it right.

Charles Handy

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

David Hume

The current education system has been hijacked by reactionaries and the emphasis on academic subjects has produced education that is mediocre, generally exhausting and virtually worthless.

Mikell Billoki

although home—schooling may work, it is by no means easy ... Noone should undertake to home-school without coming to terms with this fundamental truth: it is the fabric of your own life you are deciding about, not just your child’s education.

David Guterson

The schools this country needs today must be institutions which abandon any and all attempts to limit the free pursuit of knowledge that every child, and every adult, engages in naturally, without any outside goading.

Daniel Greenberg

The spontaneous wish to learn, which every normal child possesses, as shown in its efforts to walk and talk, should be the driving force in education.

Bertrand Russell

Using school as a sorting mechanism, we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and who steep upon the streets.

John Taylor Gatto

To learn to know oneself, and to find a life worth living and work worth doing, is problem and challenge enough, without having to waste time on the fake and unworthy challenges of school - pleasing the teacher, staying out of trouble, fitting in with the gang, being popular, doing what everyone else does.

John Holt

Most criticism of the old education, and the old concepts it conserves and transmits, from Paul Goodman to John Gardner, makes the point that the students who endure it come out as passive, acquiescent, dogmatic, intolerant, authoritarian, inflexible, conservative personalities who desperately need to resist change in an effort to keep their illusion of certainty intact.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

Our chief educational problem is deschooling schools, rather than deschooling society.

Roland Meighan

The skilled teacher, when a pupil is entrusted to his care, will first of all seek to discover his ability and natural disposition and will next observe how the mind of his pupil is to be handled ... for in this respect there is an unbelievable variety, and types of mind are no less numerous than types of body.

Quintillian on Roman Education

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it be called.

John Stuart Mill

I believe that the computer presence will enable us to so modify the learning environment outside the classroom that much, if not all, the knowledge schools presently try to each with such pain and expense and such limited success will be learned, the child learns to walk, painlessly, successfully, and without organised instruction. This obviously implies that schools, as we know them today, will have no place in the future. But it is an open question whether they will adapt by transforming themselves into something new or whither away and be replaced.

Seymour Papert

The new education has as its purpose the development of a new kind of person, one who - as a result of internalising a different set of concepts - is an active, inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality, who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to) meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival.

The new education, in sum, is new because it consists of having students use the concepts most appropriate to the world in which we all must live. All of these concepts constitute the dynamics of the question-questioning, meaningmaking process that can be called

‘learning how to learn.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

f personal quality is to be preserved, efinite teaching must be reduced to minimum, and criticism must never carried to such lengths as to roduce timidity in self-expression. ut these maxims are not likely to ad to work that will be pleasing to n inspector.

Bertrand Russell

My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school.

Margaret Mead

The only real object of education is to leave a man in the condition of continually asking questions.

Tolstoy

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

John Taylor Gatto

Education is a Good Thing because man has an insatiable appetite to learn and understand and because prominent amongst the joys that console him on his earthly journey is the joy of communicating to others, and especially to the young, what he has learnt and understood, and even more, how he managed to come by the learning and understanding.

Enoch Powell

The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no ‘adequate technical education which is not liberal and no liberal education which is not technical.

Alfred North Whitehead

There is, I believe, actually nothing more powerful to say abtut education than this: that all people, however young or old, have an enormous drive and capacity to learn; that many aspects of typical schooling get in the way of this, pajtly by assuming that the reverse is true; that learners really start to explore and exercise their potential only as they take charge of their lives; that the most effective teachers trust learners, enhance their self-esteem, have no need to control them, provide an unconditional support which doesn’t go too far, and value all types of intelligence in all areas of learning.

Paul Ginnis

People must be educated once more to know their place.

UK Department of Education official responsible for National Curriculum planning

A school, like a fascist state, is about the business of compelling people to conform to a pattern of behaviour and a way of thinking decided by the few who hold power over them.

Chris Shute

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Derek Bok