Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge.
Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.
Schools [are]...institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.
Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.
When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
School reform is not enough. The notion of schooling itself must be challenged.
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.
Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.
Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.
There isn't a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
Child labor becomes a label of condemnation in spite of its ancient function as the quickest, most reliable way to human independence
In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
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.
The economy schoolchildren currently expect to live under and serve would not survive a generation of young people trained to think critically.
In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.
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.
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.
Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.
What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
Shouldn't we also ask ourselves what the consequences are of scrambling to provide the "most" of everything to our children in a world of fast dwindling resources?
The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.
The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.
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.
Our cultural dilemma has nothing to do with children who don't read very well. It lies instead in the difficulty of finding a way to restore meaning and purpose to modern life.
Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family.
One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.
I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.
School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.
It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.
School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.
This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.
I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
The old system where every child was locked away and set into nonstop, daily cut throat competition with every other child for silly prizes called grades is broken beyond repair. If it could be fixed it could have been fixed by now. Good riddance.
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.
By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
People are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others.