I saw this on the internet, written in 1999 by someone I don't know. It is a compilation of quotes that I believe are worth weighing when one is considering whether or not to allow their child to be involved in compulsory schooling or to keep them at home in the care of parents or guardians who love them.
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The reasons WHY many of us are working to deschool society is summed up nicely by the following collection of quotes are from "The Freethinker's Guide to the Educational Universe -- A Selection of Quotations on Education" Compiled by Roland Meighan, and published in 1994 by Educational Heretics Press, 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote Hills. Nottingham NG9 3FQ:
My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school. -- Margaret Mead
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 disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. -- Stanley Milgram
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 students¹ 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 parents¹ meeting and complained about the extraordinary mount of testing we were doing. His words went right to the heart of the matter: ³You¹re like a gardener who constantly pulls his plants up by the roots to see if they¹re growing.² -- John Holt
No teacher ever said: ŒDon¹t value uncertainty and tentativeness, don¹t question questions, above all don¹t think!¹ 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 doings¹ 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 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 don¹t. -- John Holt
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; I¹ve 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 handicaps¹, 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. That¹s 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
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 children¹s 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 schools¹ 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 isn¹t 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 don¹t get their learning. They may have to comply but they won¹t 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 child¹s education. Because they are still children themselves, it simply does not occur to them to take an active role in their children¹s 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
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
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
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 doesn¹t 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
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
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
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
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 I¹ll show you a bully and a bore. -- Robert Morley
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
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. -- John Dewey
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
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
It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator¹s role is to regulate the way the world Œenters into¹ the students. His task is to organise a process which already happens spontaneously, to Œfill¹ the students by making deposits of information which he considers constitute true knowledge. And since men Œ receive¹ 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 Œfit¹ 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 youth¹s 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
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 Œhomework¹. -- 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
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. They¹d search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog, and they¹d put it on the other end of the plank. Then they¹d 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 can¹t think are ripe for dictatorships. -- Carl Rogers
What good fortune for those in power that people do not think. -- Adolf Hitler
Good teaching is that which leads the student to want to learn something more. -- Paul Goodman'
I deeply believe that traditional teaching is an almost completely futile, wasteful, overrated function in today¹s changing world. It is successful mostly in giving children who can¹t grasp the material, a sense of failure. -- Carl Rogers
It¹s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It¹s 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
But, good gracious you¹ve got to educate him first. You can¹t expect a boy to be vicious till he¹s been to a good school. -- ŒSaki¹ (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
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 Œanswers¹ 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
All my own work as a teacher and learner has led me to believe 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
Šmuch of so-called Œdiscipline¹ 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 I¹ve ever acquired. -- Albert Einstein
To be caught up into the world of thought - that is being educated. -- Edith Hamilton
We don¹t 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, ŒWhat are we educating for?¹ ŒWhat sort of people are we expecting to produce?¹ ŒWhat kind of society do we envisage?¹ -- 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
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
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
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
What we can learn best from good teachers is how to teach ourselves better. -- John HoIt
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. Shouldn¹t 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
....at most schools should be resource centers for parents as they school their children... libraries, tutors, social centers, gymnasiums, meeting places.
But the idea of a teacher standing in front of a classroom "talking" to students is just absurd.
What a useless way to spend ages 6 to 18!
