Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Updike

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

John Taylor Gatto

God was pitched out of forced schooling on his ear after WWII. This wasn't because of any constitutional proscription-there was none that anyone had been able to find in over a century and a half-but because the political state and corporate economy considered the Western spiritual tradition too dangerous a competitor. And it is.

John Taylor Gatto

Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.

John Taylor Gatto

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

John Stuart Mill

Of all many-sided subjects, [education] is the one which has the greatest number of sides.

John Stuart Mill

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

John Stuart Mill

‎A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

John Sergeant Wise

Father had notions about manhood suffrage, public schools, the education and the elevation of the masses, and the gradual emancipation of the slaves, that did not suit the uncompromising views of people in places like Richmond.

James S. Coleman

If we refuse to accept as inevitable the irresponsibility and educational unconcern of the adolescent culture, then this poses a serious challenge.

Martin Luther

It is cheering to note that [Martin] Luther (1524) did not see why schools should not be fun as well: "Now since the young must leap and jump, or have something to do, because they have a natural desire for it which should not be restrained (for it is not well to check them in everything) why should we not provide for them such schools, and lay before them such studies?

Martin Luther

As when my little son John offendeth: if then I should not whip him, but call him to the table unto me, and give him sugar and plums, thereby, I should make him worse, yea should quite spoil him.

Martin Luther

I only ask in all kindness that the man who wishes at this time to have my books will by no means let them be a hindrance to his own study of the Scriptures, but read them as I read the orders and the ordures of the pope and the books of the sophists.

Martin Luther

I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.

Martin Luther

Thus every matter, if it is to be done well, calls for the attention of the whole person.

Martin Luther

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

Martin Luther

One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.

Martin Luther

When schools flourish, all flourishes.

Martin Luther

Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!

Martin Luther

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

Martin Luther

One Book is enough, but a thousand books is not too many!

Martin Luther

I am much afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which means are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must be corrupt.

Nancy Astor

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

... garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society.

Moses Hadas

I am a teacher... The life I lead is the most agreeable I can imagine. [In the] classroom ... there await me a group of intelligent and curious young ... [people] who read the books assigned them with a sense of adventure and discovery, discuss them with zest, and listen appreciatively to explications I may offer. What makes the process most satisfying is the conviction that ... education is mankind's most important enterprise.

Mortimer Adler

Education is the sum total of one's experience, and the purpose of higher education is to widen our experiences beyond the circumscribed existence or our own daily lives.

Paulo Freire

Only through communication can human life hold meaning.

Paulo Freire

It is impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identities that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it.

Paulo Freire

No reality transforms itself.

Paulo Freire

Love is an act of courage.

Paulo Freire

The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of 'correct thinking.'

Paulo Freire

One of my major preoccupations is the approximation between what I say and what I do, between what I seem to be and what I am actually becoming.

Paulo Freire

Indeed, some "revolutionaries" brand as "innocents," "dreamers," or even "reactionaries"; those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation - the process of humanization - is not another deposit to be made in men.

Paulo Freire

One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.