Quotations on thinking, speaking and writing (27)

Critical remarks about schooling

“American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.”
~Diane Ravitch (pictured)

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

~H. L. Mencken

“The widespread substitution of indoctrination for education in America produces lots of young people who have been conditioned to believe that their inflated sense of self-worth and moral superiority are marketable skills. Unsurprisingly, many end up in politics…”

~Thomas A. Oakes

“The simple fact is that when parents send their children to school they want them to become good readers. They don’t send them to school to become socialists.”
~Samuel L. Blumenfeld

“...women should not be allowed within fifty feet of a school where boys are taught. A boy, especially a bright one, will want to drop out of school through the nearest window and run screaming to a recruiting office for the French Foreign Legion – anything to get away from inane, vapid, and insubstantial feel-good compulsory niceness inflicted by some low-wattage ed-school grad.”

~Fred Reed

“Never let school interfere with your education.”

~Mark Twain

The Takeaway: Keep an open mind. Or, as Robert Frost put it, “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.” (BTW, how did you fare on the above quotations?)

See disclaimer.