Introduction

When I made the first selection of quotations on education in 1991 it was published under the title of "Unfashionably Unfascist?" Despite the long recession in the UK, now resulting in its twentieth or so recovery according to official sources, it sold out within months. It was enthusiastically received as a source book for discussions and also for illustrative material for lectures, lessons and seminars. Students also found the contents useful in the preparation of their essays on educational and related themes. Some resourceful people of a sharing disposition purchased multiple copies to give as presents to friends at Christmas.

In response to the comments and suggestions that were forthcoming from owners of the first compilation, which now appears to have the status of a collector’s item, the new selection is produced in hardback for use as a library or classroom reference book, or as a coffee-table source book. Most of the quotations from the first book have been retained and augmented with additional ones so that the selection is twice the size of the original.
 
 

Thomas Huxley

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 earning environment outside the classroom that much, if not all, the knowledge schools presently try to each with such pain and expense and much 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, meaning-making process that can be called learning how to learn.

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

If personal quality is to be preserved, definite teaching must be reduced to minimum, and criticism must never carried to such lengths as to produce timidity in self-expression. But these maxims are not likely to lead to work that will be pleasing to an 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 about 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, partly 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

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

Arithmetic ... is overvalued; in British elementary schools it takes up far more of the time than it should. The average man should be able to do accounts, but beyond that he will seldom have occasion for sums. What he may have learnt of complicated arithmetic will be of no more practical use to him in later life that would the amount of Latin he could have learnt in the same time

Bertrand Russell

The adults of today spent twenty-five hours of their young lives learning quadratic equations, with varying degrees of success. Was it time well spent?

Philip Gammage

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

John Taylor Gatto

School is necessary to produce the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society.

Ivan lllich

Some true educational experiences are bound to occur in schools. They occur, however, despite and not because of school.

Everett Reimer

When we put together in one scheme such elements as a prescribed curriculum, similar assignments for all students, lecturing as almost the only mode of instruction, standard texts by which all students are externally evaluated, and instructor chosen grades as the measure of learning, then we can almost guarantee that meaningful learning will be at an absolute minimum.

Carl Rogers

Assessment, more than religion, has become the opiate of the people.

Patricia Broadfoot

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

Oscar Wilde

A child born in the U.K. stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them.

R. D. Laing

The aim of education is to induce the largest amount of neurosis that an individual can bear without cracking up.

W. H. Auden

Do we create conflict by conditioning our children to pledge their allegiance, obey and defend their country without question? ... Or is he or she, by the very face of his or her commitment to and identification with the fragmented nationalistic view, paradoxically the enemy of peace?

Terrence Webster-Doyle

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Stanley Milgram

All sorts of intellectual systems -Christianity, Socialism, Patriotism etc., - are ready, like orphan asylums~ to give safety in return for servitude. A free mental life cannot be as warm and comfortable and sociable as a lift enveloped in a creed.

Bertrand Russell

School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that it teachings must be taken on faith.

John Taylor Gatto

Show me a man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I’ll show you a bully and a bore.

Robert Morley

Public schoolboys, whatever their particular school, ... had a language of their own ... ways and attitudes which they took for granted but which were foreign to me: for instance their acceptance of sodomy as more or less normal behaviour.

Malcolm Muggeridge

The starting point is wonder, curiosity and the joy of discovery, which external compulsion is more likely to extinguish than ignite.

Philip Coggin

The most beautiful thing in the world is, precisely, the conjunction of learning and inspiration. Oh, the passion for research and the joy of discovery!

Wanda Landowska

I have never allowed schooling to interfere with my education.

Mark Twain

Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement (USA) has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; ... the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

John Taylor Gatto

It is heresy that education is useful, with the corollary that education produces economic well-being.

Enoch Powell

Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children

John Dewey

There can be no agreement between those who regard education as a means of instilling certain definite beliefs, and those who think that it should produce the power of independent judgement.

Bertrand Russell

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.

Elbert Hubbard

The things taught in school are not an education but the means of an education.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in its students.

John Ciardi

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

Alfred North Whitehead

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana

Two institutions at present control our children’s lives: television and schooling, in that order.

John Taylor Gatto

Education is an admirable thing but it as well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
 

The authority of those who teach is very often a hindrance to those who wish to learn.

Cicero

Thank God I was never sent to school To be flog’d into following the style of a fool.

William Blake

No one who had any sense has ever liked school.

Lord Boothby

It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world ‘enters into’ the students. His task is to organise a process which already happens spontaneously, to ‘fill’ the students by making deposits of information which he considers constitute true knowledge. And since men ‘ receive’ the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated man is the adapted man, because he is more ‘fit’ for the world. Translated into practice, this concept is well suited to the purpose of the oppressors, whose tranquillity rests on how well men fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.

Paulo Friere

The hard task of education is to liberate and strengthen a youth’s initiative and at the same time to see to it that he knows what is necessary to cope with the ongoing activities and culture of society, so that his initiative can be relevant. It is absurd to think that this task can be accomplished by so much sitting in a box facing front, manipulating symbols at the direction of distant administrators. This is rather a way to regiment and brainwash.

Paul Goodman

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Norman Douglas

We must have some concept of the kind of person we wish to produce before we can have any definite opinion as to the education which we consider best.

Bertrand Russell

It is an iron law of education that rigid systems produce rigid people, and flexible systems produce flexible people.

Roland Meighan

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its ‘homework’.

John Taylor Gatto

The 145 year-old system we are still trying to use after 145 years of failure must be scrapped and replaced. Small improvements, even if attainable, will not stave off collapse.

Leslie A. Hart

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

Jacob Brownowski

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Lilian Smith

Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?

A. J. Ayer

Thought only starts with doubt.

Roger Martin Du Gard

This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a crossbar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They’d search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog, and they’d put it on the other end of the plank. Then they’d guess the weight of the stone.

John Dewey

The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents but should rely instead on the evaluation of certified officials.

John Taylor Gatto

People who can’t think are ripe for dictatorships.

Carl Rogers

What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.

Adolf Hitler

If there is anything education does not lack today, it is critics.

Nathan Pusey

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

Bertrand Russell

If a curriculum is to be effective ... it must contain different ways of activating children, different ways of presenting sequences, different opportunities ... A curriculum, in short, must contain many tracks leading to the same general goal.

Jerome Bruner

Good teaching is that which leads the student to want to learn something more.

Paul Goodman

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

A Whitney Griswold

Education: that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Ambrose Bierce

I deeply believe that traditional teaching is an almost completely futile, wasteful, overrated function in today’s changing world. It is successful mostly in giving children who can’t grasp the material, a sense of failure.

Carl Rogers

It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

John Holt

The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.

Bertrand Russell

…our schools reflect our society closely, except that they emphasise many of its worst features.

Paul Goodman

But, good gracious you’ve got to educate him first. You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school.

‘Saki’ (Hector Hugh Munro)

The immediate case against compulsory school for adolescents is quite simply their barbarity: it is a triangle of hatred, humiliation and contempt.

Frank Musgrove

True education does not quiet things down, it stirs them up. It awakens consciousness. It destroys myth. It empowers people.

John Holt

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things - the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and counterfeit.

Samuel Johnson

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

George Macauley Trevelyan

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Happiness in childhood is absolutely necessary to the production of the best type of human being.

Bertrand Russell

That children do not come to school by choice is another terrible indictment of our whole educational. system.

John Kirkbride

There is no point ... in learning the ‘answers’ for very soon there will be different answers.

Paul Goodman

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.

G. K. Chesterton

The greatest challenges facing both the arts and education are how to navigate the perilous course between adventure and discipline; how to respond to tradition without either becoming its slave or rejecting it.

Robert Corrigan

Education is a method by which one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Laurence Peter

All my own work as a teacher and learner has led me to believe .m. that teaching is a very strong medicine, which like all strong medicines can quickly and easily turn into a poison. At the right time (i.e. when the student has asked for it) and in very small doses, it can indeed help learning. But at the wrong times, or in too large doses, it will slow down learning or prevent it altogether.

John Holt

A boy will toil uphill with a toboggan for the sake of a few brief moments of bliss during the descent; no one has to urge him to be industrious, and however he may puff and pant he is still happy.

Bertrand Russell

Schools have not necessarily much to do with education ... they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be instilled in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.

Winston Churchill

The education of today is nothing more than drill ... children must become accustomed to obey, to believe, to think according to the social dogmas which govern us.

Francisco Ferrer

I remember spending the greater part of my childhood wondering about adults. Were they ever children? From their behaviour toward children it seemed to me quite clearly that they could never have possibly been children.

Ashley Montague

…much of so-called ‘discipline’ is founded on unusual and extraordinary behaviour patterns which prepare children for nothing much. The result is either a rejection of all adult authority as meaningless, or a blind acceptance that it is adults or others who tell you what to do, and you need not work it out for yourself.

Lynn Davies

I owe more to my ability to fantasise than to any knowledge I’ve ever acquired.
Albert Einstein
 

My optimism is based on the hope that public opinion will no longer tolerate the cover-up of child abuse in the name of child-rearing, once it has been recognised that ... child-rearing is basically directed not toward the child’s welfare but towards satisfying the parents’ needs for power and revenge.

Alice Miller

Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age, purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. For the most part it only serves to enlarge stupidity, inflate conceit, enhance credulity and put those subjected to it at the mercy of brainwashers with printing presses, radio and television at their disposal.

Malcolm Muggeridge

To be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated.

Edith Hamilton

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Henry Adams

To the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name Knowledge.

Ambrose Bierce

Why should we subsidise intellectual
curiosity?

Ronald Reagan

…with the death of curiosity we may reckon that active intelligence, also, has died.

Bertrand Russell

By education most have been misled;
So they believe, because they were so bred.
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.

John Dryden

We don’t need no thought control.
Pink Floyd
 

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

Gloria Steinem

The ultimate victory of tomorrow is democracy, and through democracy with education, for no people in all the world can be kept eternally ignorant or eternally enslaved.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

All to often, in debates about education, the basic questions are ignored in favour of mere technical issues. We should always begin by asking, ‘What are we educating for?’ ‘What sort of people are we expecting to produce?’ ‘What kind of society do we envisage?’

Clive Harber

Children who are lectured to, learn how to lecture; if they are admonished, they learn how to admonish; if scolded, they learn how to scold; if ridiculed, they learn how to ridicule; if humiliated, they learn how to humiliate; if their psyche is killed, they will learn how to kill - the only question is who will be killed: oneself, others or both.

Alice Miller

We must approach educational democracy carefully, so as to destroy in the process as little as possible of the valuable products that happen to have been associated with social injustice.

Bertrand Russell

Education today, more than ever before, must see clearly the dual objectives: education for living and education for making a living.

James Mason Wood

The only form of society which facilitates the continued evolution of the human species is a democratic form of society, and furthermore, the development of such a democratic society is dependent to a large degree on the democratisation of schools and schooling.

John Dewey

Democracy is not genetic. It is learned behaviour and it can equally be unlearned if education does not operate with democratic values, principles and methods.
Clive Harber
 

A teacher is one who, in their youth, admired teachers.

Henry Menken

An education enables you to earn more than an educator.

Anonymous

Not only do students in school spend very little time working together, but in many cases they are actually working against each other in competition for grades.

Susannah Sheffer

What the world now needs is not competition but organisation and cooperation; all belief in the utility of competition has become an anachronism. ... the emotions connected with it are the emotions of hostility and ruthlessness. The conception of society as an organic whole is very difficult for those whose minds have been steeped in competitive ideas. Ethically, therefore, no less than economically, it is undesirable to teach the young to be competitive.

Bertrand Russell

They know enough who know how to learn.

Henry Adams

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

George Halifax

The fact is that children are not naturally either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They are born with only reflexes and a few instincts; out of these, by the action of the environment, habits are produced, which may be either healthy or morbid.

Bertrand Russell

Why not make schools into places in which children would be allowed, encouraged, and (if and when they asked) helped to explore and make sense of the world around them ... in ways that most interested them?

John Holt

Any examiners’ meeting where anxieties are expressed if there are ‘too many’ first class degrees will demonstrate the shallowness of any expressed national concern to raise overall standards of performance.

Lynn Davies

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person.

Alice Miller

Break their wills betimes; begin this great work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all. Let him have nothing he cries for, absolutely nothing, great or small. Make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. Break his will now and his soul will live, and he will bless you to all eternity.

John Wesley

It is true for both pupils and teachers that degradation and humiliation alternate with “having a laugh”: this is the unending dialect of school life, the alternation between laughter and soulless despair.

Frank Musgrove

Education extracts the active ingredient of living a full, inquisitive life, calls it ‘learning’ and then attempts to improve this learning through bureaucratic administration of curriculum.

Ivan Illich

The government is making schooling the latest nationalised industry

Ian Lister

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

Winston Churchill

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Charlotte Whitton

The sum of human knowledge and the complexity of human problems are perpetually increasing; therefore every generation must overhaul its educational methods if time is to be found for what is new.

Bertrand Russell

It is better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.

Anatole France

What we can learn best from good teachers is how to teach ourselves better.

John HoIt

When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.

Paul Simon

Among all the leading figures of the Third Reich, I have not been able to find a single one who did not have a strict and rigid upbringing. Shouldn’t that give us a great deal of food for thought?

Alice Miller

It gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.

Adolf Hitler

Schools learned long ago that the way to keep children from thinking is to keep them busy.

Everett Reimer

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

Albert Einstein

Instead of a National Curriculum for education what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child, within common guidelines maybe, but given expression in a formal contract between the home and the school.

Charles Handy

The only form of society which facilitates the continued evolution of the human species is a democratic form of society and furthermore that the development of such a society is dependent to a large degree on the democratisation of schools and schooling.

John Dewey