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Quotes on Education
If you gag on the never-ending parade of out-of-context quotations posted up in classrooms as supposed arguments against substantive learning (e.g., "Imagination is more important than knowledge" -- Einstein) then you've come to the right place! The Best
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CategoriesKnowledge
-- Helen Keller
"Knowledge is love and light and vision."
"There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic,
because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing."
"Knowledge rests on knowledge; what is new is meaningful because it departs
slightly from what was known before."
"With more knowledge comes a deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring
one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may
prove disappointing, with pleasure and confidence we turn over each
new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful
questions and mysteries-certainly a grand adventure."
"Ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven."
"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant;
it's that so much they know isn't so."
"What is ultimately practical for our species is to form the habit
of valuing knowledge for its own sake."
"Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong."
"Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be
kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.
"Knowledge is one of the few things that can be given to others without reducing the amount you have left."
"The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's
knowledge of the facts. The less you know, the hotter you get."
"Why does content matter? Content matters because skills are not
enough. Skills are necessary but they are only the beginning of
learning. Without skills, one cannot acquire knowledge. Knowledge
builds on knowledge."
"Content matters because it is the stuff that makes comprehension
possible. Content matters because content is knowledge. Students with
more knowledge have more vocabulary. Students with more vocabulary
and knowledge have greater comprehension."
"Instead of educating future journalists on the nuts and bolts of
journalism -- because let's be honest, it isn't rocket science or even
carpentry -- it would make more sense simply to teach them things.
Facts, it turns out, are useful. Most people can write a nut graf
after 30 minutes of practice, but comparatively few people can
explain, say, econometrics, or fluid dynamics, or the history of the
French Revolution. Aspiring journalists don't need tradecraft --
they need a liberal arts education that gives them a base of mastery
in actual academic subjects."
"One of the major contributions of psychology is the recognition [that] ...
much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided
by the information expressed in the text itself, but must be drawn
from the language user's knowledge of the person, objects, states of
affairs, actions, or events the discourse is about."
"What greater gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?"
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their
own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
"Education is the transmission of civilization. Civilization is not inherited;
it has to be learned again by each new generation."
"By viewing the old we learn the new"
"No one can become really educated without having pursued some study
in which he took no interest"
Sculley: "Why is it so dark in here?"
"All your people must learn before you can reach for the stars."
"We grow accustomed to the dark, when light is put away."
"Excellence is achieved by the mastery of fundamentals."
"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."
"Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est." ("Knowledge is power.")
"Knowledge and human power are synonymous."
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
"Genius without education is like silver in the mine."
"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him.
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
"Non schola sed vita decimos" (Only the educated are free)
"It's harder to conceal ignorance than to acquire knowledge."
"The mind is the man, and knowledge mind; a man is but what he knoweth."
"It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say 'I don't know.'"
"Charles V said that a man who knew four languages was worth four men;
and Alexander the Great so valued learning, that he used to say
he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge
than his father Philip for giving him life."
"The search for truth is in one way hard and in another way easy,
for it is evident that no one can master it fully or miss it wholly.
But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the
facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur.
All men by nature desire knowledge.
"Knowledge is the food of the soul."
"Most people are not only comfortable with their ignorance,
but hostile to anyone who points it out."
Incogito nullo cupido.
"The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.
That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling
in your anatomies, you may lie awake in the middle of the night
listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love,
you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics,
or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.
There is only one thing for it then — to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it.
That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate,
never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."
"Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser;
teach a righteous man and he will increase in learning."
"Apply your mind to instruction and your ear to words of knowledge."
"By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established;
by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.
A wise man is mightier than a strong man, and a man of knowledge
than he who has strength"
"The advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it."
"I turned my mind to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the sum of things"
"The first law of history is not to dare to utter falsehood;
the second, not to fear to speak the truth."
"Knowledge is the only fountain both of love and the
principles of human liberty."
"As a general rule, the most successful man in life is
the man who has the best information."
"Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason,
the registry of conscience, and the council chamber of thought."
"True expertise is the most potent form of authority."
"A desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind;
and every human being whose mind is not debauched will be willing
to give all that he has to get knowledge."
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our
inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the
state of facts and evidence."
"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave."
"The more the ignorance, the better the slave"
"Et nunc, reges, intelligite, erudimini, qui judicati terram:
"Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough."
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge."
"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."
"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you."
"The further I go, the sorrier I am about how little I know: it is this that bothers me the most."
"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."
"Each excellent thing, once learned, serves for a measure of all other knowledge."
"Knowledge is power and enthusiasm pulls the switch."
"The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history,
languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn
anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are
just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots."
"Let knowledge grow from more to more."
"Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams."
"Knowledge is the only fountain both of the love and the principles of human liberty."
"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."
"All men by nature desire to know."
"One of the most common reasons so few people are consistently able to
achieve meaningful results is that they are unwilling to experience
the discomfort associated with relentlessly pursuing a correct
perception of reality."
"Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul."
"Knowledge is an antidote to fear."
"Knowledge begets knowledge. The more I see, the more impressed I am -- not with what we know -- but with how tremendous the areas are as yet unexplored."
"Knowledge is more than equivalent to force."
"The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty."
"As knowledge increases, wonder deepens."
"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that
you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for."
"The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches,
increases ever with the acquisition of it."
"Happy the man who knows the causes of things."
"Knowledge is the frontier of tomorrow."
"A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it.
This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows."
"All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not."
"Any piece of knowledge I acquire today has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal
with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better."
"As the Spanish proverb says, 'He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies,
must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.' So it is in travelling;
a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge."
"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge."
"The greater becomes the volume of our sphere of knowledge,
the greater also becomes its surface of contact with the unknown."
"For remember, my friend, the son of a shepherd who possesses knowledge
is of greater worth to a nation than the heir to the throne, if he be
ignorant. Knowledge is your true patent of nobility, no matter who your
father or what your race may be."
"Knowledge is the only fountain both of the love and the principles of human liberty."
"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people."
"Man is distinguished, not only by his reason; but also by this singular passion from other animals ... which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure."
"Man is not weak; knowledge is more than equivalent to force."
"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."
"Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to
what others say about subjects you have studied but recently."
"The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever
with the acquisition of it."
"The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks
is of more importance to the public than all the property of all
the rich men in the country."
"Information is the currency of democracy."
"Knowledge -- that is, education in its truest sense -- is our best protection
against unreasoning prejudice, and panic-making fear, whether engendered
by special interest, illiberal minorities or panic-stricken leaders."
"A liberal education ... frees a person from the prison-house of his class, race,
time, place, background, family, and even his nation."
"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army."
"Those who know the least obey the best."
"Knowledge ... is also power;
prior to its being a power, it is a good; that it is not only an instrument,
but an end."
"Pursue knowledge for its own sake -- for the glory of God, the perfection of
your mind, the good of the universe"
"As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of
the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the
thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory."
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our
inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the
state of facts and evidence."
"We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated,
but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free."
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
"Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."
"Knowledge is good." Confidence in Ignorance"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."-- Aristotle
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."
"There seems to be something 'liberating' about ignorance -- especially when
you don't even know enough to realize how little you know.
"There have always been ignorant people, but they haven't always had college degrees
to make them unaware of their ignorance. Some people imagine that they are well informed
because they have memorized a whole galaxy of trendy dogmas and fashionable attitudes." "It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion." -- Thomas Sowell, Ph.D.
"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense
of moral superiority in their ignorance."
"One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are
unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other
people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans -- anything except reason."
"Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous.
Not only are educated people likely to have more influence,
they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they
are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields."
"Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue,
ignorance has the guilt of vice."
"It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so." "It is no small gain to know your own ignorance" -- St. Jerome - 4th Century
"The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it,
to confess your ignorance."
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
"The more you know, the more you know you don't know."
"As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious."
"He who knows best knows how little he knows."
Good writing requires reading"When a man writes from his own mind, he writes very rapidly. The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book." -- Samuel Johnson"The first qualification of a writer, is a perfect knowledge of the subject which he undertakes to treat; since we cannot teach what we do not know, nor can properly undertake to instruct others, while we are ourselves in want of instruction." -- Samuel Johnson "No writer who rarely reads can write well; the writing mind must be stimulated with words from outside the self." -- Gloria T. Delamar "Perhaps the reason why the U.S.A. lags behind other nations in book-reading is that there are so many people trying to write and have no time left over for reading." -- Editors of J. B. Lippencott Co.
"In writing one first must have something to say (knowledge) and then
one must work to express that knowledge so it may be understood."
"Critical Thinking"
-- Albert Shanker, late former president of the American Federation of Teachers, ("Debating the Standards", New York Times, Jan. 29, 1995)
"The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our
time: that one can think without having anything to think about."
"The evidence regarding critical thinking is not reassuring. ...
Usually, it isn't the logical structure of people's inferences
that chiefly causes uncritical thinking but rather the
uninformed or misinformed faultiness of their premises."
"We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant."
"There are really no such things as 'critical thinking' or 'problem solving'
skills that operate independently of factual knowledge. A broad, integrated 'data
base' of knowledge is the intellectual scaffolding -- the "mental Velcro"-- that
enables us to make sense of new information, by relating it to what we already
know."
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts."
"Contrary to popular belief, everyone is not entitled to their own opinion ...
If you don't know the facts, your opinion doesn't count."
"Critical thinking is a lot harder than people think,
because it requires knowledge."
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I didn't know."
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
"Good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation."
"In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves
the full benefit of their inexperience."
"The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. ...
these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and
then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion
you didn't know existed."
"The less you know, the more you think you know,
because you don't know you don't know."
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory,
or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between
what you do know and what you don't."
"You can't think or communicateÊoutside of the box if you don't know what's in the box."
"Whenever I hear people say that they 'think outside the box' I cringe, because ...
I hear these people saying ... that one need not know what is well-accepted.
As a teacher, I want my students to know what is inside the box. ...
It is because knowing what is inside the box is the only way to get outside the box in a useful way
once the basics are mastered.
Psychologists who study prodigious accomplishments, in science, music, or art, speak about the 10,000-hour rule,
meaning that in order to do something notable in some field, one must devote 10,000+ hours to
mastering the discipline in question. Practice, practice, and practice, ...
and appreciate that much of this practice needs to be done inside the box.
If you never venture outside the box, you will probably not be creative.
But if you never get inside the box, you will certainly be stupid."
"... when a child has a problem, to urge him to think when he has no prior experiences involving some of the same conditions, is wholly futile."
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism repeated by all copybooks, and by eminent
people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of
thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization
advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without
thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in battle --
they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be
made at decisive moments."
"If you lack background knowledge about the topic,
ample evidence from the last 40 years indicates you will not
comprehend the authorÕs claims in the first place."
"We hear and apprehend only what we already half know."
"Only when we know a little do we know anything; doubt grows with knowledge."
"'...we of this age have discovered a shorter and more prudent
method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of
reading or of thinking.'"
"There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping
the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to
win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority,
longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own
ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge."
"...we should not necessarily conclude that higher-level strategic skills
are somehow the critical issue. It is exactly these processes that are most
vulnerable to specific knowledge failures. We think these processes are
important, but we suspect that they develop ordinarily in tandem with the
gradual accumulation of knowledge..."
"When children enter our public schools, they are encouraged not to learn what
other people thought about things, but rather to 'think for themselves' -- which is
crucial, but also fruitless without insights from beyond one's own mind or beyond
the minds of one's similarly underdeveloped peers."
"In 1998 a study ... reported the most
common discussion model among students was stating what they were certain they
already believed, not learning what they did not or exploring the views of those
with whom they disagreed."
"We hear a great deal these days about the pedagogical benefits of discussion. But
the assumptions we uncovered -- such as the belief that advocacy is the purpose of
discussion -- illustrate why this method is often not as effective as we'd hope."
"The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea
that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is --
second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and
pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time."
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as
if nothing had happened."
"To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what
the world tells you you ought to prefer,
is to have kept your soul alive."
"I refuse to engage myself in a battle of wits with a man who is unarmed."
"It is easy to spot an informed man -- his opinions are just like your own."
"Learning without thought is labor lost.
Thought without learning is perilous."
"He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet."
"Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship."
"To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious.
But the stupid have an answer for every question."
"I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity."
"The empty vessel makes the greatest sound"
"Do not speak unless your words improve upon the silence."
"You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything.
"The knowledge of the ignorant is unexamined talk."
"He who trusts in his own mind is a fool;
but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered."
"A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
but only in expressing his opinion."
"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?"
"An erudite fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool."
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact."
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
"A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing strange things,
and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him;
but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can
believe such."
"[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, and not those who know much,
who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
"To know and yet think we do not know is the highest attainment.
Not to know and yet think we do is a disease."
"Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient
guarantee of truth."
"Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse."
"To realize that you do not understand is a virtue;
Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect."
"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it's enough."
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
"Students come to us having sat around for twelve years expressing
attitudes toward things rather than analyzing. ...
They are always ready to tell you how they feel about an issue,
but they have never learned how to construct a rational argument
to defend their opinions."
"Professors complain about students who arrive at college with
strong convictions but not enough knowledge to argue persuasively
for their beliefs. ... Having opinions without knowledge is not
of much value; not knowing the difference between them is a
positive indicator of ignorance." Excerpt from Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat: When I asked Bill Gates about the supposed American education advantage -- an education that stresses creativity, not rote learning -- he was utterly dismissive. In his view, those who think that the more rote learning systems of China and Japan can't turn out innovators who can compete with Americans are sadly mistaken. Said Gates, "I have never met the guy who doesn't know how to multiply who created software ... Who has the most creative video games in the world? Japan! I never met these 'rote people' ... Some of my best software developers are Japanese. You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them."
"Frequently our students come into the university domain thinking
that all opinions are equally valid. This view has threatened the
intellectual development of students since the time of Socrates
because it allows students to think that incomplete, illogical,
and nonsystematic thought is 'good enough.' Unfortunately, it never is."
"Eventu rerum stolidi didicere magistro."
"Insufficient facts always invite danger."
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories,
instead of theories to suit facts."
"The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact -- of absolute
undeniable fact -- from the embellishments of theorists and reports.
Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our
duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special
points upon which the whole mystery turns."
"Then, with your permission, we will leave it at that, Mr. Mac.
The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data
is the bane of our profession."
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the
evidence. It biases the judgment."
"It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts."
"'Data! Data! Data!' he cried impatiently. 'I can't make bricks without clay.'"
"People used to say, "'Ignorance is no excuse.' Today, ignorance
is no problem. Our schools promote so much self-esteem that people
confidently spout off about all sorts of things that they know nothing about."
"Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance.
Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of
knowledge by promoting 'self-esteem' and encouraging them to have opinions
on things of which they are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed."
"The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people
are. ... These young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then
the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't
know existed."
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
"Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has a
right to be wrong in his facts."
"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to
imagine your facts is another."
"Nothing is more tragic than ignorance in action."
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
"You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even
reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting
yourself up as a judge of the highest matters."
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no
evidence that it is not utterly absurd."
"Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's
opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
"I respect your right to have an opinion. But it's awfully hard to respect your
opinion when it is so woefully misinformed, so laden with nonsensical conspiracies,
so sadly influenced by newage (that's New Age, but it rhymes with sewage),
and so utterly devoid of reason."
"The young specialist in English Lit ... lectured me severely on the
fact that in every century people have thought they understood the
Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong.
It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge'
is that it is wrong. ... My answer to him was, '... when people thought
the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth
was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the
Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat,
then your view is wronger than both of them put together.'"
"Unlike in the past, ignorance is no longer tempered with humility.
Rather, after years of psychotherapy disguised as pedagogy, ignorance
is now buoyed by self-esteem -- which, in turn, makes students more
resistant to remediation since they don't believe there's a problem. ...
For the last two decades, I've taught freshman courses at CUNY and
SUNY colleges in the city; the majority of my students have been
products of the city's public schools.
I am saddened, therefore, to report that more and more of them
are arriving in my classes with the impression that their opinions,
regardless of their acquaintance with a particular subject,
are instantly valid -- indeed, as valid as anyone's.
Pertinent knowledge, to them, is not required to render judgment."
"Research in thinking skills has found one thing that
separates experts in a field from very good but
less-than-expert practitioners: experts are so skilled at the basics they can quickly move to
more advanced and creative problem solving. ...
For all the well-intentioned talk of 'higher-order thinking skills,' too many students don't have
enough of a grasp on basic skills and knowledge to adequately function at 'higher' levels."
"I hear more and more from our faculty members that students
simply do not turn in assignments, do not attend class with any
regularity, do not respect others in their demeanor or behaviors,
and do not see any value in learning as a process. These students,
they tell me, are convinced that the final product is the goal,
whether that is a grade, a certificate, or a degree. All of this,
they say, is in much greater frequency now than in the past.
I hear it so often now, from so many disciplines and demographics,
that I believe it is the most important barrier to good learning in
our classrooms, both for these students and for those who are more responsible."
"What seems to have disappeared in just a generation or so is the willingness we used to have to defer judgment until we had enough experience and breadth of knowledge to make a judgment. The students, more socially ambitious than intellectually curious, feel put upon and won't abide what they believe to be the absurd and arbitrary demands of their instructors. The instructors have devised a way to pander to this classroom anarchy by incorporating it into their peculiar hermeneutic theories of literature -- or else they have abandoned faith in the very idea of objective worth. They don't have the nerve to stand there at the front of the classroom and announce what is painfully obvious: 'You're young, you're dumb, and you're wrong.'" "Curiosity"
-- Kahlil Gibran
"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
"I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift,
that gift would be curiosity."
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind."
"Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates
the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality."
"I have no special gift; I am only passionately curious." "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity." -- Albert Einstein
"Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat,
I say only the cat died nobly."
"Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning.
The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient."
"Some people like to say that children are innately curious and
that they'll construct knowledge for themselves. To an extent,
that's true; children are innately interested in socialization and sex,
for instance. But that doesn't mean they are innately interested
in history and math. These things have to be taught..."
"Curiosity is the lust of the mind."
"Desire to know why, and how - curiosity, which is a lust of the mind, that a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge - exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure."
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of the vigorous mind."
"Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient."
"Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence."
"Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not."
"Is not yours the best way? To learn because one loves learning."
"A sense of curiosity is nature's original school of education."
"There are different kinds of curiosity; one of interest, which causes us to learn that which would be useful to us; and the other of pride, which springs from a desire to know that of which others are ignorant."
Dumbing-Down
-- Dave Ziffer
"What do they do in the grammar schools? These kids can't put a sentence together."
"Unfortunately, the dumbed-down education of previous generations
means that many parents today see nothing wrong with their children
being manipulated in school, instead of being educated."
"The goal of public education has morphed from educating youngsters to
simply moving students -- good, bad and indifferent -- through
government schools like so much sausage by inflating grades, turning
teachers into 'facilitators,' expecting students to educate each
other, and discouraging students who really want to learn by failing
to exercise a measure of discipline in the classroom."
"The intellectual foundations of our society are presently
being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens
our very future as a Nation and a people ... If an unfriendly
foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have
viewed it as an act of war."
"For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills
of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach,
those of their parents."
"When a parent asks a child, 'What did you learn in school today?' and
the child says, 'Nothing much', consider that the child may be giving a honest
and accurate answer."
"...I think we are sometimes guilty of not teaching to the
rigor of those courses. ... We sometimes lower the bar because we
want to make sure everyone gets over it."
"Wise people created civilization over the centuries and clever people are
dismantling it today. You can see it happening just by channel surfing on TV
or hear it in rap music or read it in the pompous nonsense of academics and judges."
"In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of
the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people
with college degrees."
"True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the United States is steadily dumbing down."
"Who can blame people for not learning what they haven't been taught?"
"For over 80 years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an
immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be
summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge."
"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance
that we can solve them."
"No man has the right to be ignorant."
"In knowledge lay not only power but freedom from fear,
for generally speaking one fears only what one does not understand."
"The more one learns the more he understands his ignorance."
"Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get."
"Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future."
"Ask our kids what they learned today and you'll get, unlike the
typical elementary school, all kinds of interesting responses.
Why? Because it's all presented to them."
"If there is a real disease in today's
society, it is the incessant introspection required in school, where what we
need is the transfer of information."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never
was and never will be."
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind
will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism."
"No error is more certain than the one proceeding from a hasty and superficial view of the subject..."
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity."
"And how is education supposed to make me feel smarter?"
"The media no longer ask those who know something ... to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it."
"Fools despise wisdom and instruction."
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
"It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity whem the excellent
lies before us."
"The voluminous book ... perfectly fits the max-min principle of the
market: maximal pretensions with minimal content. ... The moral
status of those who designed the business calculus course is like
that of colonial-time hucksters who sold cheap beads, mirrors and
'fire-water' to ignorants, whose role is now played by students. I do
not blame rank-and-file teachers, because they have no choice."
"A student can take four years of math courses in high school, but if
the content of those course doesn't cover essential knowledge and
skills needed in college and work, then that student is less likely
to be well prepared to succeed."
"Thanks to this witch's brew of low expectations,
dumbed-down standards, and perversely misapplied therapeutic and
humanitarian practices and policies, students learn -- on their way to
college -- that hard subjects will be made as easy as possible; that
schmoozing about life roles or movies is more fun than analyzing
Macbeth or learning calculus; that teachers will pass them on to the
next grade despite substandard work; that homework will be sparingly
assigned and seldom monitored; that if students have trouble with
math, the mastery of computational skills will be declared
counterproductive, that if they cannot read, the definition of
literacy will be expanded, and, that if they fail tests, their scores
will be readjusted ... No wonder so many students ... regard education with
contempt."
"One reason why they can sustain this level of denial is that the
schools look normal. A new school was recently built in our neighborhood.
Its architecture is not my cup of tea, but its reflective windows
and clean, low rectangular shapes appeal to the modern sensibilities
of my neighbors. Inside, shiny linoleum floors and computer stations
radiate an atmosphere of high tech academics. As a species, we believe
that anything that looks good is good. We buy cars
this way, we buy houses this way, some of us pick spouses this way, and we
enroll our kids in schools this way."
"One of the principles that are doing as much as anything else to undermine
American schools is the fixed notion that education has to be fun. We won't
have our children subjected to anything hard or bothersome. We have
practically adopted as a national education motto: 'If it isn't easy,
it isn't educational.' ... The consequences ... are many and obvious. ...
Homework is considered an old-fashioned institution, a carry-over from the
days when schooling was unpleasant, an interference with the child's and the
family's recreation. ... Drill, repetition, recitation, and memory-work are
dismissed as drudgery."
"Progressive education is based on some false assumptions. It assumes that all
boys and girls can be entertained to a point where they will be interested
in all subjects. This is untrue. ... The old-fashioned theory that a student
should study what he needs to know rather than what interests him is sounder
than the new theory."
"Some people like to say that children are innately curious and
that they'll construct knowledge for themselves. To an extent,
that's true; children are innately interested in socialization and sex,
for instance. But that doesn't mean they are innately interested
in history and math. These things have to be taught..."
"[Constructivism is] like telling a child to educate himself and
find what he can find. That doesn't make any sense. How is a child
going to know what he or she is interested in if not provided with
things to choose from? There's something I've always found funny.
In a lot of schools, teachers say, 'We're getting ready to
cover mammals,' but cover means to hide. Well, we don't want to cover,
to hide; we want to put it out there for the children so they can
see it and work with it. We're not going to sit back and watch
while the child tries to put all these things together
for himself. No."
"You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn
by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives."
"There is only one good, knowledge, and only one evil, ignorance."
"Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly
will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily."
"Without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own
sake, our options become dangerously limited."
"Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric
by later generations -- perhaps for ...
allowing our children to grow up ignorant."
"I think we have a chance to do something about
education, very important. We should have done it years ago. It doesn't
matter who does it -- Democrats or Republicans -- but it's long overdue. Our
education system is a monstrosity. We need to go back and rebuild
kindergarten and first grade and teach reading and writing to everybody, all
colors, and then the whole structure of our education will change because
people will know how to read and write."
"Success will not lower its standard to us. We must raise our standard to
success."
"If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it."
"The great danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss,
but that we aim too low and we hit it."
"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
"Against stupidity the gods themselves fight unvictorious"
"It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine
the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal
of schools for everybody by having schools without education."
Anybody who accepts mediocrity - in school, on the job,
in life - is a person who compromises, and when the leader
compromises, the whole organization compromises.
"Ignorance is Strength"
"I find it appalling every time a professor of television at
Syracuse University says this is a sign of the dumbing down
of America. I think it's a sign of the dumbing down of America
that there are professors of television at major universities."
"If you back me against a wall, I would say ostensibly, as a piece
of art, Hamlet is in some ways superior to Lou Grant."
"For parents whose offspring have just left home to embark on a
media studies degree, there's no easy way for me to tell you this.
I've spent almost my entire career in journalism -- the BBC,
Sunday Business, The Sunday Times, and The Sunday Telegraph,
and I have yet to meet anyone with an editorial job whose
first degree was in media studies. I really do mean nobody".
"They're called lessons because they lessen from day to day."
"This ain't no party! This ain't no disco! This ain't no fooling around!"
"God is in the details"
"I wonder what they do teach them at these schools."
From the motion picture, "Sleepless in Seattle":
"In the musical 'The Music Man,' Professor Hill convinced many parents
that their children were musically gifted and could play an instrument
without learning about notes and practicing scales. The professor's
special talent was demonstrated when the parents, mesmerized by
Professor Hill's words, believed that their children were actually
playing well, in the face of a discordant cacophony to the contrary.
This clearly argues for the existence of a flimflam factor as a form of
[multiple] intelligence to add to our list."
From the motion picture, "The Music Man":
"Although doing right is better than knowledge,
knowledge comes before doing. Thus, every person
must learn in order to do."
"To withhold demanding content from young children between
preschool and third grade has an effect which is quite different
from the one intended. It leaves advantaged children with
boring pabulum, and it condemns disadvantaged children to
a permanent educational handicap that grows worse over time."
"There is a consensus in cognitive psychology that it takes
knowledge to gain knowledge. Those who repudiate a fact-filled
curriculum on the grounds that kids can always look things up
miss the paradox that de-emphasizing factual knowledge actually
disables children from looking things up effectively ... In
order to be able to use information that we look up -- to absorb it,
to add to our knowledge -- we must already possess a storehouse of
knowledge. That is the paradox disclosed by cognitive research."
"The phrase 'Developmentally Appropriate Practice' has been very
effective politically. It has played on our love and solicitude
for young children. It is used as a kind of conversation stopper.
If one is told that an educational recommendation is
'developmentally inappropriate,' one is supposed to retreat and
remove the offending item from the early curriculum.
But this retreat has to stop.
We must stand up to unsupported rhetorical bullying,
and rely on the people who know the research.
To cave in to intimidating rhetoric is to harm our children,
not help them. [It] is wasting minds
and perpetuating social inequities. ...
One of the greatest services we can provide to our children
would be to start inducing self doubt in those early-childhood
experts who have been wielding the word 'inappropriate' like a battle-ax."
"My name is Jose Castro-Rodriguez. I'm in the first grade,
and right now we're learning about Ancient Egypt -- about the
sacophagus -- that's what they put the mummies in -- and how
they got the bodies ready to be mummies and which body
parts they put into the canopic jars -- they threw away
the brain because they thought the heart did the thinking:
and how they had to make sure no one finds out where the
mummies were, because you're not supposed to mess with
dead people: and how they used an ostrich feather to
measure the heart, and if it was little that meant you
had been good and could go to the next life: and about
the different Egyptian gods. And we've been learning about
King Tut ... I also know a lot about the Aztecs. Do you want me
to tell you about that, too?"
We do not expect a second-grader to remember years later everything
we taught about Egypt, but when he studies the material again later,
he will find himself in familiar territory. ... One of the
things that makes history classes [in later grades] so boring is that very few
students come to them with such a background. Because everything
is new, everything must be memorized.
"Why do so many public school classrooms resemble therapeutic day care programs
with kids roaming around and doing little that amounts to learning?"
"How young is too young to discover the power and beauty of words?
Perhaps he will not understand, but there is a clash of shields
and a call of trumpets in those lines.
One cannot begin too young nor linger too long with learning."
"If you want to destroy a country, destroy its memory."
"Standard English is just a 'prestige' dialect among many others;
and ... insistence on its predominance constitutes an act of repression
by the white middle class"
"Dewey, more than any other single person, must be held responsible for
the intellectual, cultural and moral poverty of much modern teaching."
Average classroom hours spent on basic subjects, typical student, grades 9-12:
"The problem is that the school is so focused on protecting
the egos of students that it breeds mediocrity. If you never
let anyone fail, how can they not be afraid of failure?"
"We work the hardest for those that ask the most of us, and, to those who ask for little, we respond with less."
"Low standards, particularly for students who have
known little else, can actually make a teacher look good.
Feel-good
activities and mind-numbing busywork can be very effective classroom
management techniques. While challenging assignments may motivate students
who have come to expect them, students who have never been pushed are likely
to react to such assignments by misbehaving. ... Many competent readers had to
be dragged, screaming and kicking, through their first novels, and many top
math students had to have the multiplication tables drilled into them. Helen
Keller first reacted to Anne Sullivan's finger-spelling lessons by screaming,
kicking, and biting. Unpleasant confrontations, however, may result in poor
evaluations from administrators or complaints from parents. Smiling faces and
busy fingers make for the best public relations."
"Most of the rap is just crap. I can't listen to a lot of it.
The only thing I listen to today is country music, because of the stories
they tell. And they can play their instruments. ...
[Techno performers] have destroyed rock'n'roll.
Those cats doing that can't play. It's just electronic push-of-the-button music.
Kids aren't learning to play horns or guitars or drums.
They're learning to push a button and have a song come out."
"Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned
against when it is doomed to ignorance."
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge
without integrity is dangerous and dreadful." "Do not refrain from speaking at the crucial time, and do not hide your wisdom. For wisdom is known through speech, and education through the words of the tongue. Never speak against the truth, but be mindful of your ignorance." -- Sirach 4, 23:25 (RSV)
"History can be well written only in a free country."
"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."
"Zeal without knowledge is fire without light."
"The highest form of ignorance is to reject something you know nothing about."
"That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge,
this I call a tragedy."
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively
assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
"Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about."
"Best efforts will not substitute for knowledge."
"It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill."
"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
"We know accurately only when we know little;
with knowledge doubt enters."
"Walk a few steps away from the faculties of science, engineering,
and medicine. Walk towards the faculty of arts. Here, you will meet
another world, one where falsities and lies are manufactured in industrial
quantities. Here, some professors are hired, promoted, or given power for
teaching that reason is worthless, empirical evidence unnecessary,
objective truth nonexistent, basic science a tool of either capitalists or
male domination, and the like. Here, we find people who reject all the
knowledge painstakingly acquired over the past 5 million years. ... This
fraud has got to be stopped, in the name of intellectual honesty. Let them
do whatever they please, but not in schools, because schools are supposed
to be places of learning. We should expel these charlatans from the university."
"For over fifty years, American schools
have operated on the assumption that challenging children is bad
for them, teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach,
that the learning "process" should be emphasised over the facts
taught within it. ... Renowned educator and author E. D. Hirsch
shows ... this establishment ideology is a
tragedy of good intentions gone awry. Hirsch argues that in
eschewing content-based curricula for abstract -- and disproved --
theories of cognitive development, the educational establishment
has done irreparable harm to America's students, and instead of
preparing them for the country's highly competitive,
information-based economy, the process-oriented curricula the
establishment practices has severely curtailed their ability,
and desire, to learn." Dumbing-Down, in Colleges and Business"In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college."-- Joseph Sobran
"The college model is broken. It costs too much. It promises too much.
It is content to let people graduate with a degree in
grievance studies and a minor in ferret husbandry."
"We are lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back
to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That's nuts."
"Almost all the really terrible ideas that blight contemporary America started on campus."
"The problem at the moment is that college students know very little
and don't know what they don't know. To ask an uneducated student
to select a course of study is to suggest the blind should lead the blind."
"The sad fact is that because students are not college-ready,
colleges are dumbing down their curriculums to be student-ready."
"Seriousness is stupidity sent to college."
"No account of the present condition of college students would be complete
without mention of the extraordinary dearth of factual knowledge they bring to
college. Horror stories on this topic abound--and they are probably all true. ...
Indeed, one can't assume that college students know anything anymore. ..."
"Alan Heimert, a veteran member of the Harvard English department, encounters the
same mushy grasp of historical knowledge and blames it on the 'trendy
social-studies curriculum' now taught in most high schools which covers broad
thematic topics rather than history. 'They are aware that someone oppressed
someone else,' he says with only slight exaggeration, 'but they aren't sure
exactly what took place and they have no idea of the order in which it
happened.'"
"Students headed for college used to get a solid grasp of both American and
European history at the high school level. Now, as most people are aware, they
pass through an array of social-studies courses designed to impress upon them the
central values of the sixties, including concern for the natural environment,
respect for people of different racial and ethnic groups, and women's rights.
These values are important and should certainly be included in the curriculum.
But teaching them in such a superficial manner, devoid of any historical context,
simply doesn't work."
"During the past thirty years the ideal of the unity of learning, bequeathed
to us by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, has been largely abandoned.
With rare exceptions American colleges and universities have dissolved their
curricula into a slurry of minor disciplines and specialized courses.
While the average number of undergraduate courses per institution has doubled,
the percentage of mandatory courses in general education has dropped by more
than half. Science was sequestered at the same time; as I write, only a
third of colleges and universities require students to take at least one
course in the natural sciences."
"Many [college professors] will candidly say that a high percentage of
today's high school graduates are 'disengaged.' They read and write poorly
and have no interest in challenging academic work. They are used to education
that is easy and entertaining, and rebel against rigorous standards and
criticism. The 'award winning' public schools that parents keep hearing about
are in fact producing hordes of young people who may be very pleased with
themselves, but are almost unteachable. Perhaps most Americans are satisfied
with the public schools, but they shouldn't be."
"The language skills of people from elite institutions frequently are
not what they should be for the types of degrees they've
accumulated, ... The old emphasis on the basics has gotten lost in the shuffle."
"Far too many of today's college students have difficulty writing a simple
declarative sentence let alone a coherent paragraph. ... In [the classes I teach]
perhaps a third of the students can write decent prose. Another third
can write sentences that can be understood with a little imagination on the part
of the reader. However, a good third of the students write so poorly that it is
difficult to understand what, if anything, they have on their minds."
"I find the English language skills, reading ability and mathematics
ability of most people who have gone to reputable schools to be
atrocious. What's worse, they're ignorant about their ignorance."
"Many of our freshmen arrive at college, after 12 years of school
(presumably in the 'college track'), knowing nothing of the
pre-Plymouth past, including the Bible. All too frequently, they have
not heard of Aristotle, Aquinas, Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke,
Montesquieu, Burke, or Marx. They often know nothing of the
deterioration of Athens and Rome, of Czarist Russia and Weimar
Germany, and next to nothing of the history of science, technology,
industry, of capitalism and socialism, of fascism and Stalinism, of
how we found ourselves in two world wars, or even in Vietnam. They
have been asked to read very little and to reflect hardly at all. At
18 or 19, they are unarmed for public discourse, their great energy
and idealism at the mercy of pop politics and the seven o'clock news."
"Students learn almost nothing about civic matters while they are in college ... Our students neither enter
nor exit their universities with a level of civic literacy that even approaches a satisfactory level." "The decline of our once-proud colleges and universities ... is the bitter fruit of our ever-more ineffective K-12 education." -- E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
"... unless we fix the leaks in the K-12 education pipeline, no higher education policy
can possibly improve minority opportunities to attend college."
"... American colleges are so incompetent and vicious that, in any really
civilized country, they would be closed by the police... Everywhere they
tend to become, not centers of enlightenment, but simply reservoirs of
idiocy. ... The childish mumbo-jumbo that passes for technique among them
scarcely goes beyond the capacities of a moron. To take a Ph.D. in
education in most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no
more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window
dressing. ... Most pedagogues ... are simply dull persons who have found it
easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out. At
this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or
folly, and always with enthusiasm. The schools reek with this puerile
nonsense. Their programs of study sound like the fantastic inventions of
comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a
dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols... Or examine a dozen or so of the
dissertations ... turned out by candidates for the doctorate at any eminent
penitentiary for pedagogues, say Teachers College, Columbia. What you will
find is a state of mind that will shock you. It is so feeble that it is
scarcely a state of mind at all."
"One of the effects of the rapid spread of higher education has been to
equip people to criticise and question almost everything.
Some of them seem to have stopped there instead of going on to the next stage
which is to arrive at new beliefs or to reaffirm old ones."
"Apparently, your brain doesn't
work out all of its kinks until you're around 25 -- a fact that seems to have eluded
everyone in history except our Founding Fathers and the people who run car-rental
companies."
"Universities cherish diversity in everything except where it counts most: ideas."
"Yes, the lectures are optional. Graduation is also optional."
Self-Esteem
-- Ben B. Lindsey, Juvenile Court Judge
"I don't have any opinions anymore. All I know is that no one is better
than anyone else, and everyone is the best at everything." From the Simpsons episode, "Girls Just Want to Have Sums": Women's educational expert Melanie Upfoot begins teaching her first class in the all-girls classroom.From the Simpsons episode, "Girls Just Want to Have Sums": Lisa has disguised herself to join the "boys" math classroom. The teacher writes the equation Y x Y = 25 on the board."People used to say, "'Ignorance is no excuse.' Today, ignorance is no problem. Our schools promote so much self-esteem that people confidently spout off about all sorts of things that they know nothing about." -- Thomas Sowell, Ph.D., "Random Thoughts," August 12, 2004
"Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance.
Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of
knowledge by promoting 'self-esteem' and encouraging them to have opinions
on things of which they are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed."
"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who
are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance." "The self-confident moral preening of ignoramuses is perhaps an inevitable product of the promotion of 'self-esteem' in our schools." -- Thomas Sowell, Ph.D.
"Flattery makes the most effective chains. Hitler told
the Germans that they were a master race -- and came very
close to making them slaves."
"There may often be excuse for doing things poorly in this world,
but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing well done."
"The preponderance of the data illustrate that self-esteem is irrelevant
in all areas of education."
"Self-esteem policies promote the worst in political correctness.
Evaluation is no longer intended to provide feedback on progress
but to make the kids feel good, even if that means deceiving them about
their true ability and achievement. Curriculum must be organized
around student interests; whether or not they are actually learning
what they need to no longer matters. And the class environment must emphasize
cooperation, never competition, so that all believe themselves
to be winners."
"The narcissism that many young people exhibit is caused primarily by
teachers and parents who lead them to believe that they are the
center of the universe. Student-centered teaching fosters this,
as does the idea of teacher as therapist."
"Three decades of research on children with conduct problems
indicates that the most effective interventions are not counseling
or other 'talking' therapies, but high structure, clear rules,
and immediate consequences.
In the words of one researcher, what these youth need
is not higher self-esteem but more self-control."
"The ed school of thought holds that if you just relax and get over the anxiety,
the greater truth will prevail. Not a word about how inadequate preparation may play a role."
"[The students'] self-esteem had been bolstered not by their having acquired any knowledge,
not by learning to manage their own impulses or to develop any skills or accomplish anything,
but rather by indiscriminate praise and a total absence of constructive criticism
or honest evaluation of their performance at any task."
"There is something inappropriate -- almost sick -- in the spectacle of
mature adults showering young people with unbelievable praise."
"Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid."
"'Know thyself.' A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly.
Whoever studies himself arrest his own development.
A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly."
"It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers -- they help us to learn."
"Self-esteem theorists appear to have it backwards. Meaningful
self-evaluation and positive self-esteem usually are the results,
not the antecedents, of accomplishments. Praise is just one
source of feedback; self-esteem more often comes from an
awareness that the requirement of a sought-after goal have been
mastered. Acquiring the knowledge and skills that enable a
child to make progress toward such goals is a necessary basis for
developing healthy, realistic self-esteem."
"As commendable as it is for children to have high self-esteem,
many of the practices advocated in pursuit of this goal
may instead inadvertently develop narcissism in the form
of excessive preoccupation with oneself."
"The entire American education system seems to exist mainly to promote
'self-esteem'. That's bad enough if you're an already insufferable prom queen
with fabulous ****. But for less favoured high-school types the cult of
self-esteem might just tip you from festering geek into narcissistic psycho. If I
understand correctly the educational philosophy underlying the English public
school, the idea seems to be to reduce self-esteem to undetectable levels within
two weeks of the start of term. On the whole, that seems the shrewder option."
"We live in a country that seems to be in this massive state of delusion, where
the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it
actually works just as long as everybody's winking at the same time. ...
My students -- all they want to hear how good they are and how talented they are.
Most of them aren't really willing to work to the degree to live up to that."
"Where talent is a dwarf, self-esteem is a giant."
"People with a high opinion of themselves could pose a far greater threat
to others than those with low self-worth ... those with high
self-esteem tend to damage other people, either because
they are reckless and dangerous or because they are unpleasant."
"I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise."
"It is better to deserve honors and not have them then to
have them and not deserve them."
"The only way to escape the corruption of praise is to go on working...
There is nothing else."
"The value of achievement lies in the achieving."
"Lewis and Clark didn't return from their trip and say,
'Well, we didn't find the Northwest Passage,
but we did find ourselves.'"
"Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them."
"It is an error for educators to argue that they can raise children's
self-esteem merely by praising them."
"People with high but unstable self-esteem exhibit the greatest hostility."
"After all these years, I'm sorry to say my recommendation is this:
Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline."
"Violence appears to be most commonly a result of threatened
egotism -- that is, highly favorable views of self that are disputed
by some person or circumstance. ... violence is
perpetrated by a small subset of people
with favorable views of themselves. ... Viewed in this light, the societal pursuit of high
self-esteem for everyone may literally end up doing considerable harm."
Education: Theory and Practice
-- Kevin Killion, Illinois Loop
"Keep me from paying attention to what is worthless"
"I cannot claim to be a good teacher simply because I have a master's in education,
two licenses and eight years of experience. I can claim to be a good teacher
only if the data demonstrate that my students have learned."
"When the grand pooh-bah PhDs of education stand up and blow, they speak with great confidence
about theories of teaching, and considering the test results, the bums ought to
be thrown out."
"All parents should sit in their kid's class for four hours with pen and paper
-- just like soccer games -- noting anything the teacher actually 'teaches' the students
that they didn't know, not mentions but teaches. If your child is in a
typical 'kids teach each other and themselves best' school, they go for days
without being 'taught' anything.
"Too many 'educators' see teaching not as a responsibility to the
students but as an opportunity for themselves -- whether to
indoctrinate a captive audience with the teacher's ideology,
manipulate them in social experiments, or just do fun things that
make teaching easier, whether or not it really educates the child."
"In most discussions of the problems of American public schools, the low
intellectual quality of people who come out of our schools of education
is the 800-pound gorilla that keeps getting ignored. Such teachers
cannot give their students intellectual abilities that they themselves
don't have."
"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians,
who must be civilized before it is too late."
"Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality. "
"The difference between theory and practice
is that in theory, there is no difference, but in practice, there is."
"A confusing of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."
"The original 'three R's' were 'reading, reckoning, and rhetoric,' a triad
known to alarmingly few pedagogues."
"No one benefits from [an education] system built on well-intentioned fictions."
"Parents, consumer organizations, state legislators, serious educational
researchers, and even federal agencies have tied together two simple facts:
"If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught."
"It is optimistic ... to expect success with children who come from
impoverished backgrounds, who lack the knowledge ... to explore an
environment and learn from their own activities. ... A large and
possibly growing number of students need the kind of help, support,
modeling, and/or scaffolding that has often been seen as antithetical
to the unstructured atmosphere of progressive education."
"Doing things the same way
you always have and expecting the results to be different is insanity."
"If you send somebody to teach somebody,
be sure that the system you are teaching is better than the system they
are practicing."
"When the students don't learn, the school must change."
"Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning"
"We have a serious crisis on our hands. ...
We should not be worrying whether particular reform proposals are too radical.
We should be worrying whether they are radical enough."
"Our K-12 system of public schools ... represents perhaps the largest socialized delivery system outside
of Communist China. And the results are all too predictable."
"Gaps and repetitions are the reality of American students' school experience ...
For students, the vagueness of the local guidelines produces an educational
experience that is sparse, repetitious, incoherent, and fragmented.
For teachers, the incoherence produces an intensely unsatisfactory professional experience,
which induces a large percentage of them to leave the profession each year."
"And then I come to this other point, that if you are placing or putting money
into a school system which itself creates this problem, or helps to create it,
or does nothing or very little to alleviate it, are we not just in fact wasting
the money of the Federal Government and the taxpayer and investing money where
it is really going to accomplish very little if any good?"
"We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place
where you want to be. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing
an about-turn and walking back to the right road. There is nothing
progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake."
"We have too many teachers who are graduating with degrees in
education. They go to schools of education or they major in
education, and they graduate knowing something called education, but
they don't know a subject."
"People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject
are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively."
"Too many teachers are not qualified in the subject they're
teaching. Too many states do not test to make sure teachers know
what they're teaching. Too many states that do test
set the bar for passing way too low."
"It is fascinating to hear teachers say that having to 'teach to the test'
reduces their ability to engage in good teaching. What they call 'good teaching'
is the very reason our students do so badly in international comparisons
and why colleges have to have large numbers of remedial courses to
teach students what they didn't learn in school."
"Some have an ideological opposition to testing as the enemy of educational creativity.
They love the intangible joys of the profession, without the inconvenience of demonstrating
that their work has any effect."
"If you expect students to know something,
you have to tell them what it is."
"Only the foolish learn from experience. The wise learn from the experience of others."
"Incogito nullo cupido."
"To know how to do something well is to enjoy it"
"Even though educators consider themselves to be 'thinking people,' there
is a remarkable absence of substantive arguments in their responses to
critics. These responses include evading the specifics of the criticisms
and arbitrarily attributing Utopian beliefs to critics. Schools and
colleges each have additional substitutes for arguments, specialized for
their respective issues."
"[Most state certification systems] assume that teacher quality
is best attained when the state heavily regulates employment, requiring
teachers to take numerous education courses before they can be considered
for a teaching job. ... [But] many education courses lack academic
substance and none is highly predictive of success.
Yet they dilute prospective teachers' undergraduate education
by displacing academic courses."
"One of the false dichotomies that has developed over time is between developing
skills vs. acquiring knowledge. ... One debate among educators is whether [skills]
are best taught directly or are they best acquired in the context of subject
matter study. Looking things up turns out to have an element of Catch 22: you
already have to know something about the subject to look it up effectively.
(Maybe that's why the "help" menu in computer programs is rarely actually helpful to me.)"
"The research appears to support the validity of a content-rich curriculum,
which builds knowledge, vocabulary, and a variety of learning skills simultaneously."
"Hundreds of studies show that a certified teacher isn't more qualified than an uncertified teacher"
"Time and again, the American public has seen the devastating effects
of programs that rely on children to 'construct' their own education ...
Some teachers end up dispensing -- and holding students accountable for --
too little information and too few skills.
The result: students who don't read well, can't multiply, and don't know much
about history and geography."
"The educational foundations of our society are presently being
eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future
as a nation and as a people ... If an unfriendly foreign power had
attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance
that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As
it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves."
"Some of the attitudes I see among [constructivist-math supporters] I haven't
seen since the '60s, with Mao's Red Guards.
We're talking serious ideology here. They believe they have the truth,
and nobody else has the truth."
"This is all part of a larger vision in which children 'discover'
their own knowledge rather than have teachers pass on to them the
knowledge of what others have already discovered. The idea that
children will 'discover' knowledge that took scholars and geniuses
decades, or even generations, to produce is truly a faith which
passeth all understanding."
"If all who are engaged in the profession of education were willing to
state the facts instead of making greater promises than they can possibly
fulfill, they would not be in such bad repute with the lay-public."
"While there are excellent schools across America, our
system is failing too many children. Nearly 70 percent of
inner city and rural fourth graders can't read at a basic
level. There is a persistent achievement gap between disadvantaged
and minority students and their peers. Reading scores have been
flat for the past eight years. The numbers show us that what
we're doing is not working...The skills and knowledge of our
children are not getting better. Our children do not need adults
who measure success in dollars. Our children don't need adults
who make excuses for their failures. Our children need adults
who focus on results. Our children deserve to learn, promptly
and well, and anything that distracts from their learning is a
distraction from schools' mission."
"All of us will have a keen eye on Littleton."
"The swing toward whole language, the substitution of whole language
for phonics, has done a lot of damage."
"One of the distinguishing features of cooperative learning
seems to be that no one has to learn all about anything."
"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."
"If Direct Instruction is so danged good, why isn't it used more?
The answer lies largely in the near-criminal behavior of most of
the education schools in America. These 'ivory tower' schools know
next to nothing about positive discipline and how to teach basic
skills. They mask their ignorance behind academic posturing filled
with words like 'constructivism,' 'learning styles,' 'teaching styles,'
and 'creativity,' but they never get around to teaching prospective
teachers how to really succeed in a classroom of disparate students.
With few exceptions, teacher education is gutless, unaccountable
and aintellectual."
"Within education schools, progressivism is the ruling ideology.
It is hard to find anyone in an American education school who does not
talk the talk and espouse the principles of the progressive creed."
"With but a few exceptions, schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college.
American education could benefit from slum removal, eliminating schools of education."
"Reformers should not worry about contemporary progressivism
because its primary advocates are lodged in education schools,
and nobody takes these institutions seriously.
Those teaching in the university think of those in ed schools as
being academically weak and narrowly vocational.
They see ed school teachers not as peers in the world of higher education
but as an embarrassment, who should not be a part of a university at all.
To them the ed school looks less like a school of medicine than a school
of cosmetology. The most prestigious universities often try to limit
the ability of the education school to grant degrees or even eliminate
the school altogether. I do not have the space to explain the historical roots
of the education school's lowly status in the United States.
But take my workd for it. Education schools rank at the very bottom."
"What surprised [him] most early in his career were the legions
of 'lone rangers' - teachers who create their own curriculum and
teach pretty much what they damned well please. 'The problem is
that the lone rangers are often the best teachers, creative and
passionate,' he says. 'But American teachers act like independent
artisans. There is no sense of clear cohesiveness.'"
"How do kids learn to read? What goes wrong when they don't? How do
you prevent it? And what do you do about it when you don't get to
them early enough to prevent it?
That should be the content that teachers and others in education
actually acquire. Do they acquire it? No.
You know, if there was any
piece of legislation that I could pass, it would be to blow up
colleges of education.
I know that's not politically correct. Those are some of the most
resistant, recalcitrant places you will ever get to. And I'm not sure
it's going to get a heck of a lot better, because again philosophy
and belief drive how their folks are taught and how their folks come
out and teach others."
"One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and
credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to
the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil
in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to
the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be
to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of
misinformation is more important than in former times to the
holders of power."
"This romanticism underlying so much American educational thought would be
merely a curiosity of American intellectual history were it not for the practical
fact that these ideas are not just empirically wrong but also pernicious in their
social and economic effects."
"The majority of the city's public school students
leave high school unprepared for more than low-paying work, unprepared for
college and unprepared for the duties placed upon them by a democratic
society. The schools have broken a covenant with students, and with
society..."
"And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does
or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in
order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point.
A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they
are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into
certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with
official rubber stamps."
"Whether public education can survive in the 21st
century will depend not nearly so much on making the system personally
interesting or occupationally relevant, as it will on helping kids and the
adults who nurture them understand that perseverance and self-discipline will
get them a lot further in life than 'interest' will. I'm not optimistic that we
will ever recognize this, much less accomplish it."
"The longer we pander to the notion of providing only 'interesting' schoolwork,
the longer it will be until we build a national seriousness about scholarliness
and the less likely it will be that we'll ever have in great quantity
students who realize their highest creative and intellectual capacities."
"The barbarians are no longer at the gates. They have breached the walls,
captured the town and are running the show."
"History can be exciting and fascinating when it is taught by those who
know it and love it. Or, it can be deadening if it is taught by people
who neither know it nor even like it."
"If I were seriously ill and in desperate need of a physician,
and if by some miracle I could secure either Hippocrates,
the Father of Medicine, or a young doctor fresh from the Johns Hopkins
School of Medicine, with his equipment comprising the latest developments
in the technologies and techniques of medicine, I should, of course,
take the young doctor.
On the other hand, if I were commissioned to find a teacher for a group of
adolescent boys and if, by some miracle, I could secure wither Socrates or
the latest Ph.D. from Teachers College, with his equipment of the latest
technologies and techniques of teaching, with all due respect to the
College that employs me and to my students, I am fairly certain that
I would jump at the chance to get Socrates."
"I have met more school teachers recently who ... wouldn't know a verb if it was as big as a table."
"Parents are some of the worst enemies we have."
"With very few exceptions, I watched for 14 years as student after
student entered and left high school having learned next to nothing
during his or her four-year term. And the problem is not in someone
else's school district: It's systemic. My experience has convinced me
that if the purpose of the public schools were to prevent children
from acquiring an education, they could not do a better job than they
are doing right now, at this very moment in classrooms all across the
nation ... Ours is an education system that labels children
learning-disabled and then calls for more tax dollars to remediate
the problem it created. It is an anti-intellectual, morally bankrupt
system whose values-clarification classes and bogus drug- and
sex-education programs contribute to the very addictions they
sanctimoniously claim to solve. It is a system that crushes our
children's intellectual curiosity and then demands they learn anyway
... Our public educational system is a monopoly founded on anti-
intellectualism and bogus theories of learning. As such, real
education has always been its enemy, the single greatest threat to
its very existence, a persistent reminder of its failed mission to
teach our nation's children ... Real education would put the
child-detention centers we call schools out of business. Real
education would close schools of education by forcing real subjects
to be taught in them ..."
"What ruins mankind is the ignorance of experts."
"The forces that put the Edsel out of business do not apply to Harvard professors."
"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation
to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow,
consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ...
What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down.
In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange,
that we cannot give what we have not got, and
cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves." Eduspeak / Jargon / Lingo"With words, we govern men."-- Benjamin Disraeli
“If you redefine words, you can change laws without legislating."
"Incomprehensible jargon is the hallmark of a profession."
"The cheaper the crook the gaudier the patter."
"The educationist, pen in hand, seems to exhibit by some kind of instinct
an almost total insensitivity to the rhythms of the English tongue; and he
can at the same time practice in one paragraph all the worst vices to be
found in comtemporary writing -- a considerable achievement. His prose as
well as his speech is apt to be marked by an excessive wordiness, by a
genuine fondness for platitudes, by an irredeemable addiction to ugly
coinages and meaningless jargon, and by a plenitude of strange
constructions."
"Much like Newspeak in Orwell's '1984', 'Educanto' is designed not to merely
express the inchoate views of an obscure priestly caste, but to make real
thought impossible."
"Whether you live in an urban neighborhood or an affluent suburb the
perception is that when parents ask tough questions, educators immediately
circle the wagons, stonewall, or throw educational jargon at you."
"We're not just the cookie bakers anymore ... but if you raise questions, you
get analogies that are designed to make parents feel stupid."
"Constructivist 'theory' is a mishmash of overlapping platitudes
and absurdities -- 'empty words and poetic metaphors'
(Aristotle, Metaphysics). Taken separately, constructivist
'propositions' are merely simpleminded. Taken together,
they are indistinguishable from the verbal behavior of a
person suffering from chronic schizophrenia." Diversity"The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures -- the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures."-- Mark Steyn "Real diversity is intellectual." -- David Mamet, playwright
"If diversity really referred to the diversity of ideas, the consideration of
broad areas of intellectual thought and human experience, then such requirements
would enrich the curriculum. The titles of such 'diversity' courses might be:
World History, Philosophy from Antiquity to the Present, or Comparative Religion.
... Instead such 'diversity' courses tend to focus on the usually narrow
grievances of one group or another."
"The gods mercifully gave mankind this little moment of peace between the
religious fanaticisms of the past and the fanaticisms of class and race that were
speedily to arise and dominate time to come."
"Everybody has asked the question ... 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have
had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has
already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not
remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if
they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or
fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will
not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let
him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him
alone!"
"There is room in American education for an authentic multiculturalism. Reading
lists can be anchored in Western thought and culture, but include the great books
produced by non-Western cultures as well. This, however, is not what the
multiculturalists want. For one thing, the great books of non-Western cultures
reflect beliefs and prejudices that are anathema to multiculturalist ideology. To
cite just two examples, the Koran embodies a strong doctrine of male superiority
and The Tale of Genji, a Japanese classic, celebrates social hierarchy."
"Publicly inconsolable about the fact that racism continues, these activists seem
privately terrified that it has abated."
"This culture forged a country where people from across the world could arrive
and become rich, happy and free -- if they assimilated."
"Multiculturalism claims to offer a real value: a cosmopolitan, rather than
provincial, understanding of the world beyond the student's immediate
surroundings. But it is a peculiar kind of 'broadening.' Multiculturalists would
rather have students admire the primitive patterns of Navajo blankets, say, than
learn why Islam's medieval golden age of scientific progress was replaced by
fervent piety and centuries of stagnation."
"What matters is not what any individual thinks, but what is true.
A teacher who does not equip his pupils with the rudimentary tools
to discover this is substituting indoctrination for teaching."
"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views,
but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."
"Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same.
But today some people are so used to special treatment that
equal treatment is considered to be discrimination."
"Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held
responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are
not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?"
"In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists,
and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity."
Education Research
-- Peter Pearson, Aptos, Calif., in the Chicago Tribune
"One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions."
"The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this:
the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment."
"If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion."
"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers,
you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it,
when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a
meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge,
but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science."
"Unfortunately, too much of what we recognize as education research
is simply opinion buttressed by anecdotes"
"Some people expect educational research to be like a group of engineers working
on the fastest, cheapest, and safest way of traveling
to Chicago, when in fact it is a bunch of people
arguing about whether to go to Chicago or St. Louis."
"Educators have tended to treat fervently-held opinion with the
same reverence as scientific fact for so long that they have lost
the ability to discern the difference!"
"Research in education is not taken seriously by any other college or
department on a university campus outside the colleges of education.
It's very fad-oriented. When people say 'research shows,' they generally
won't even be able to cite a paper... But if they do and you
actually read it, you'll find that it's just unmitigated opinion."
"There are big schools of reading
methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice,
you'll see the reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going up -- in
spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to
improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't
work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method
should work?"
"Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators
discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been
for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no
one pays any attention to it."
"If a physician prescribes a drug that research shows
not to work, what happens to the physician?
When educators use 'approaches' that research shows
not to work, does anything happen -- except to the children who are damaged?"
"Among the community of people who have backing in scientific methods
and use objective principles, [we see] a real difference in standards
[between] education research that appears in education journals and
what appears in psychology and science journals."
"University schools of education are held in low regard
by others in the arts and sciences."
"Teacher licensing programs are cash cows. ... The schools are
interested in filling slots instead of trying to raise low standards.
The departments are often segregated and taught by professors of
education who've gone through the same (unscientific) program."
"[Education] students don't get the same grounding in psychology,
linguistics, language development or neuropsychology."
"Whole language made its way into schools with no strong
research backing. In fact, the tenets of whole language were
actively contradicted by reading psychologists for 25 years.
It's appalling."
"There is no relation between what is practiced in a
classroom and what is validated. It is unusual for consumers in
education to decide what they are going to do and what materials
they are going to buy based on independent, scientific validation."
"The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'."
Boys and Girls
-- U. S. Department of Education, 2000
"Just when you thought nothing new could be added to progressive
education's long catalog of failures, yet one more has come to light
-- and it is a particularly grave and far-reaching failure.
For progressive ed, I would argue, is responsible for the epidemic
of underachievement among boys in British state schools, now so deep
and widespread that it is taking on the proportions of a national crisis.
... The real culprit is the radical shift in teaching methods and
in the content of the school curriculum that progressive education has wrought.
... Lost utterly, too, was any kind of rigor in instruction.
... The school dropped formal training in literacy and numeracy
in favor of 'project learning' -- play-like, unstructured, open-ended work,
done in groups.
... Progressive ideology rejected the very idea that getting answers
right was important.
... The brunt of all this fell most disastrously on boys -- who, it turned out,
tempermentally depended much more than girls on the principles of traditional
education: discipline, structure, and competition.
... One key reason why girls are doing strikingly better than boys is
that teachers, in accordance with progressivist ideology, now judge
schoolwork in a way that rewards enthusiasm and personal involvement
more than objective knowledge and accuracy.
... School is now designed to be most helpful to the self-disciplined
and self-motivating -- which, during childhood and adolescence, largely
means girls."
"Many boys think that their grade schools are boy-unfriendly. I well
remember my son bursting into the kitchen one day after school, yelling
'They want us to be girls, Mom, they want us to be girls!'"
"The poor performance of English boys in relation to girls,
particularly in reading skills, is a relatively new phenomenon.
Various surveys show that, formerly, where sex differences did
occur at the age of 7 or 8, they usually disappeared by the age of 11.
Today, significant differences between girls and boys are still
dramatically apparent in English tests at the ages of 14, 16 and 18.
... However, there is one English-speaking country that is very
similar to England but where no sex differences in reading exist.
That country is Scotland.
... There is one major difference in educational policy between the two
countries. While 1960's child-centred methods of instruction have
radically reshaped the teaching of reading in England, in Scotland
methods have remained more traditional and phonics-based.
It may be that code-based methods of reading instruction are more
advantageous for boys than other methods."
"Educators today are intolerant of boys acting like boys. ...
When boys aren't being punished for being boys, they are being medicated
to accomplish the same result. It is revealing that 95 percent of the
kids on Ritalin today ... are boys.
... This view has found its most receptive audience in education,
which is dominated, to a greater extent than other professions, by women.
The result is a commitment to ... monitoring and policing characteristically
male behavior, and getting boys
to participate in 'characteristically feminine activities.'
As a result, our sons think there's something wrong with being a boy.
As Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist, puts it, our sons feel like a
'thorn among roses' and a 'frowned-upon presence' in our schools.
This war that's being waged on sons isn't only cruel; it's culturally disastrous."
"We spent most of the 1990s fretting about bogus research claiming that
the schools were shortchanging and damaging girls, when the truth is
that boys are the ones in trouble.
Boys are much more likely than girls to have problems with schoolwork,
repeat a grade, get suspended, and develop learning difficulties.
... They are five times more likely than girls to commit suicide and four
to nine times more likely to be drugged with Ritalin.
Student polls show that both girls and boys say their teachers like
the girls more and punish the boys more often.
Girls get better grades than boys, take more rigorous courses,
and now attend college in much greater numbers.
While the traditional advantage of boys over girls in math and science
has narrowed (girls take as least as many upper-level math courses as boys,
and more biology and chemistry), the advantage of girls over boys
in reading and writing is large and stable." From the Simpsons: Principal Skinner [phonily]: Am I wearing women's clothes? I didn't notice. When I look in my closet, I don't see male clothes or female clothes, they're all the same. What Americans Think About Schools
-- Bill Gates, addressing the National Governors Association, February 2005
"That, for many fellows, is the biggest shock: that public school
systems pretend they don't have to operate like other companies and
organizations, that they can get the best people without giving
them incentives, that their funding comes from heaven,
that being a public employee charged with doing nice things
for children means never having to answer to shareholders -- in this case, taxpayers."
"There is widespread agreement that America has the best universities in the world. ...
But virtually no one says we have the best K-12 education in the world."
"The cities have been murdered by their schools. If the schools
were good, we could handle the other problems."
"Most Americans have no idea how bad things really are.
We are in a state of emergency. I'm blown away that this isn't
what is on every parent's mind when it comes to elections ...
that people are not in the streets fighting for their kids."
The "top issue in the nation": Education
Issues most important for the next president to deal with:
Every year, the Illinois-based Coalition for Consumer Rights conducts a survey of about 800 Illinois voters, gauging public opinion on some 50 topics ranging from the economy to product safety. Here are the top-ranked issues in their 1999 Survey of Illinois Voters:
Does your school have high academic standards (Percent saying "yes")? -- 71% of principals -- 60% of teachers -- 38% of students -- report in the January 2002 issue of School Reform News In general, would you say schoolchildren today are being taught more worthwhile and useful things than children were 20 years ago, not as worthwhile things, or about as worthwhile things as then? (The same question was asked in 1950 and 1999.)
(How to read this chart: In 1950, 67% of people said that children were then being taught things that were more worthwhile than 20 years earlier. But in 1999, 53% of people said that what children were being taught was not as worthwhile as 20 years earlier.) Parent Choice
-- Tom Zafiratos, superintendent of Pennoyer District 79 in Norridge, a suburb of Chicago (Norridge and Harwood Heights News, February 3, 2005)
"Broadly speaking, there are only two ways to create accountability for
student progress in large systems: standards, or competition.
The standards movement is getting its chance now. Depending on how well
it delivers, the voucher movement, or at least more radical forms
of public school choice, may not be far behind."
"And so reality intrudes on the best intentions of the No Child Left
Behind Act. 'Choice' is limited, in part because school bureaucracies
have been slow to embrace it, and in part because legislatures and
Congress have been reluctant to embrace such measures as school
vouchers, designed to give low-income children broader access to
private school alternatives."
"The only reason that public schools enjoy as much
support as they still do is that most parents are still harboring the
illusion that the schools are still somehow similar to the schools of their
own youth."
"The major roadblock to the advance of school choice in the
suburbs is not how to pursue a solution, but for families
first to recognize there is a problem and that they have little
choice or control over what their children are taught in public schools."
"The cities have been murdered by their schools. If the schools were good,
we could handle the other problems."
"I do believe you will find a strong movement for charter schools and
school choice whenever a school district is not responsive to
what parents want."
"There is nothing in the concept of democracy to require that schools be subject
to direct control by school boards, central offices, departments of education,
and other arms of government. ... There are many paths of democracy and public education."
"The United States is the outlier -- it's the place that is strange. All of the
Western European countries and Canada have school choice. They don't always call
it vouchers but they have it. If you lived in Winnipeg you could go to any
private, public or parochial school and the province pays. They have choice. They
have choice in Sweden -- socialist Sweden has choice: vouchers for going to
religious schools, private schools, public schools. Only the United States has
this system where all the money just goes to the government-owned schools. It's
unusual. It's weird. It's not sustainable in the long run. Eventually choice will
catch on."
"Expanded parental choice is a necessary condition for
authentic school reform."
"The idea of a public school monopoly is dead. It needs to be
relegated to the Smithsonian."
"We must love our children's hopes and dreams and prayers more
than we love the institutional heritage of the school system."
"How did we ever get into a situation of telling parents where they have to send their kids to school?"
"In order to improve K through 12 education, I believe it is essential for
parents to have options. They should have more than a Hobson's choice when
it comes to educating their children -- they should have real choice.
They should be able to consider a magnet program in a neighborhood school, or an
innovative charter school, or an improving public school or the chance to
apply for a scholarship to help pay the tuition at a private school.
That's the kind of choice that will inspire competition and foster innovation."
"President Bush talks about school choice and accountability,
which is good, but 'No Child Left Behind' has allowed very few parents
to choose different schools for their children.
What it has allowed is an unprecedented expansion of federal authority
over schooling."
"Based on the substantial amount of money pumped into the schools
and the resultant test scores, I do not believe that money alone
is going to solve the problem. This is why I believe the
District [of Columbia] should be allowed to try [school vouchers]."
"If I was the parent of a child who went to an inner-city school
that was failing ... I might be for vouchers, too."
"Money is not the only answer to the crisis in education ...
We also have to shake up the system. The current system is not
functioning as well as it should. I'm intrigued by the ideas of
vouchers and choice as a way to create competition in the educational
marketplace. I bet such competition would be popular, and would
excite a lot of families, a lot of parents, a lot of students."
"If you ask me
personally, I'm still for a test of vouchers. ... But I understand how
this works when you are vice president."
"The standoff between vouchers and money is predictable. It is also
regrettable, because it prevents consideration of a most promising way to
improve school performance -- giving kids 'progressive' vouchers that are inversely
related to the size of their family's income ... Why not simply 'voucherize' all
education funding and let students and their parents select where they can get
the best education?"
"Most American parents give their kids' schools an A or B grade,
but that's only because, without market competition, they don't know
what they might have had."
"The state has intruded into civil society in a way that the Founders
would never have envisaged. It does not merely fund the majority
of schools: it controls them."
"If public money that is reasonably attributable to the State is used to pay for
a religious education, it violates the Constitution ...
The only way in which it's not attributable to the State is if it doesn't go
there by virtue of a State action or a State decision, but the circuit is
broken ... and the circuit is broken because in between, standing
between the State and standing between the schools, is an independent party with
decisionmaking to divert it away."
"If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates
of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies."
"Assumption of responsibility by government for educating all children
does not require that schooling be delivered in government-run
institutions -- just as government food stamps need not be spent in
government grocery stores. ...
"Vouchers are not an end in themselves;
they are a means to make a transition
from a government to a market system."
"I am a public school teacher. I made what was a very difficult decision
last year -- to send my child to a private school. ... The public school
where I work is full of hard working, dedicated teachers, who are stretched
to their limits. They are aware of many children whose needs they cannot meet.
We have tried many extra groups, team teaching, etc., to attempt to meet those
needs in a better way. It is not nearly enough. We need massive change in the
system. I don't see this happening soon. I welcome vouchers. I deserve to have
more choices for my child. The children and families I work with deserve
more choices."
"What is the fundamental difference between our higher educational system and
our K-12 system? The real, fundamental difference is that Northwestern University
doesn't own any students. The University of Chicago doesn't own any students. The
University of Illinois doesn't own any students. They have to earn them. They
have to compete."
"If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective
or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down."
"We have found, in our country, that when people have the right to make decisions as close to
home as possible, they usually make the right decisions."
"If you spend your own money on yourself, you care how much
you spend and how well you spend it.
"The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose,
excludes any general power of the state to standardize children by
forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.
The child is not the mere creature of the state:
those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right,
coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him
for additional obligations."
"Americans, with our supposed love of freedom and democracy,
never question the right of the state to proselytize children.
That to me is one of the great affronts to human liberty."
"If the First Amendment is applied to the reality of schooling as it has
developed in this century, the conclusion must be that individual liberty,
the healthy functioning of the political system, and the preservation of a
truly public and governable public-school system require a separation of
school and state."
"People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of
educational experience they want their children to have. "
"Private schools are held to account in the most effective way possible -- they're
accountable to their customers who are free to take their business elsewhere if
they're not satisfied."
"There was a day, within our lifetimes, when public officials stood
in school doorways in an attempt to keep some students from entering.
Now we have the sad spectacle of others symbolically standing in
school doorways attempting to keep any students from getting out."
"To have a constitutional right dependent upon an ability to pay is no right at all."
"If the government would make up its mind to require for
every child a good education, it might
save itself the trouble of providing one."
"The objections which are urged with reason against State education, do not apply
to the enforcement of education by the State, but to the State's taking upon itself to
direct that education, which is a totally different thing."
"An education established and controlled by the State,
should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many
competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of
example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a
certain standard of excellence."
"We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of
conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental
Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the
rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best
government."
"State ownership means trusting the politicians."
"Education is the established church of the United States.
It is one of the religions that Americans believe in.
It has its own orthodoxy, its pontiffs and its noble buildings."
"Practically all the time in traditional Western classrooms ... is spent on producing
respectable mediocrity."
"As long as we don't have a choice, nothing is going to change."
"It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school."
"Riddle of the year : How is a public school like the U.S. Post Office?
"We must trust parents -- not government -- to make the education decisions
that affect their kids. It's simply a matter of social and economic justice."
"It is ironic that teacher unions oppose voucher plans -- even when
limited only to public schools. For years, the unions have demanded
recognition of teaching as a full profession... The irony: Only under
a voucher plan would teachers be as 'professional' as are doctors or
lawyers. Professionals, except teachers, already work in an open
marketplace."
"If former President Clinton had proposed legislation with testing,
greater federal funding and no private school vouchers, conservatives
would have killed it. Not only would we have killed it, but we would
have held a press conference celebrating its defeat."
"If this [voucher] provision is eliminated, we have lost most of the
president's vision for education reform because the only thing this
bill will do is empower the bureaucrats in Washington."
"...parental choice and involvement are important to excellence in education...
... parents have a fundamental right to direct the education and
upbringing of their children..."
"A child will be better brought up by a wise father however limited,
than by the cleverest teacher in the world."
"The only real measure of a teacher's competence, over time,
is whether parents want the services of that teacher."
"We've all bought into the crazy idea that for some
mysterious reason -- which no one seems able to articulate -- education
should not operate according to the same principles that govern every other
sector of our society. ... But we do have a model for competition and choice.
It's called all the rest of America. In fact, we even have a competitive
model within education, and it's called the university system."
"It is irrelevant whether the parents of a voucher student are
satisfied or dissatisfied with the education that their children receive."
"Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be
given to their children."
"The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect
for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to
ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity
with their own convictions."
"The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect
for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians, to
choose for their children schools, other than those established by
the public authorities, which conform to such minimum educational
standards as may be laid down or approved by the State and to ensure
the religious and moral education of their children in conformity
with their own convictions."
"I used to think that technology could help education. I've probably
spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than
anybody else on the planet. But I've come to the inevitable conclusion
that the problem cannot be fixed with technology ...
No amount of technology will make a dent. ...
It's a political problem ... The problems are unions. ...
You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and
the dropping of SAT scores, and they're inversely proportional. The
problems are the unions in the schools ... I'm one of these people
who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system."
"I believe that if Martin Luther King and A. D. King were here they
would say 'Do what's best for the children.' It [the idea for school
vouchers] may sound radical, but so were they."
"It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,
a bureaucratic system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance,
and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity.
It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve:
It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
"I find it intriguing that public school teachers who have never put
their kids in the schools that they teach in will insist that poor
parents keep their children in these very schools. Why? Because if
those children leave, it could affect their employment.
But if the school is not good enough for their children,
why is it good enough for anybody's children?"
"If parents of students have the right to choose so many other
basics in their lives -- such as where they live,
where they go to church, where they work -- then they also ought
have the right to choose where their children go to school."
"It is amazing how many people think that the government's role
is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want."
"If you are serious about wanting to improve education, do not vote more money for the education establishment that has been dumbing down the schools for years. Vote for vouchers, tax credits, or anything else that will transfer decision-making power to parents."
"The one area that I would emphasize ... is choice and vouchers. ...
The only thing that I believe is going to change dramatically public education
in this country is to go to a choice system and break up the monopoly."
"It is out of character for a country that prides itself on intellectual
freedom to put the education of its young in the hands of the state."
"Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that,
if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another.
But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy."
"Unfortunately, when most people call for solutions, a different
way of thinking is usually the last thing they have in mind.
What they want instead is something that will not challenge their
assumptions, shock their sensibilities, or violate the conventional wisdom."
"[W]e have a serious national crisis on our hands ... we should not
be worrying whther particular reform propositions are too radical.
We should be worrying whether they are radical enough."
"Our K-12 system of public schools ... represents perhaps the largest
socialized delivery system outside of Communist China.
And the results are all too predictable."
"The schools operate as a monopoly, sheltered from the market
consequences of failure."
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people
themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control
with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform
their discretion."
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
I have sworn on the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form
of tyranny over the mind of man."
Note:There are many other great quotes about choice and vouchers on this page at the SchoolReformers website.
"If I didn't think a charter school was necessary, these letters have
convinced me the high school was not doing an adequate job in teaching
English language arts."
"The reason so many charter schools sprouted in Arizona so
quickly is that, once again, we bypassed the school districts.
The early charter movement floundered a decade ago because most
states forced schools to obtain charters from local school boards.
No surprise that charters weren't springing up fast: this
would be like Burger King asking for permission to sell
Whoppers in the local McDonald's. There's just not going
to be any enthusiasm to help out the competition."
"The traditional public school system must change how it
does business to compete with charter schools."
"Charter schools are just public schools on a slightly longer leash. A dog on a long leash is still a dog on a leash."
"Competition from charter schools is the best way to motivate the ossified
bureaucracies governing too many public schools. This grass-roots revolution
seeks to reconnect public education with our most basic values: ingenuity,
responsibility, and accountability."
Parents
-- Walter E. Williams
Government and Unions
-- First Law of Education Reform, Irving Kristol, 1994
"And that I think that there is probably a special place in hell
reserved for politicians who betray our nation's most helpless
children for the benefit of a sullen and recalcitrant teacher's
union. There they spend all eternity explaining to their victims why
they couldn't possibly have risked their precious babies' future in
the public school system, yet felt perfectly free to fling other
peoples' children into it by the thousands."
"Perverse incentives work. A law where the consequences mean
that Arkansas has zero failing schools and Michigan has 1,500
is bound to have unintended consequences -- every state strives
to be Arkansas."
"Governance of many schools is such that you turn the steering wheel
but the vehicle doesn't turn."
"If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot,
it could create academic administrators."
"There's a tradition in education that, if you spend a dollar and it
doesn't work, you should spend two dollars; and not only that, you
should give those two dollars to the same person who couldn't do the
job with only one."
"What would happen if we suddenly found out that in the inner city,
doctors were opposed to diagnosis and preferred to treat all
patients with their favorite medicine regardless of the patient's
condition? How comfortable would we be with a statistic saying
that poor and minority children were 40% incurable?"
"You would risk a hernia if you tried to carry all the studies which show that
more money has virtually no effect on the quality of American education."
"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is
found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to
insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
"In large states public education will always be mediocre,
for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad."
"Public educators, like Soviet farmers, lack any incentive to produce
results, innovate, to be efficient, to make the kinds of of difficult
changes that private firms operating in a competitive market must make to survive."
"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."
"But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom,
can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever."
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to
study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics
and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture,
navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their
children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture,
statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
"If Al Gore can teach journalism in a prestigious
graduate school, why wouldn't he be allowed to teach civics in a
New York City public high school?"
"With respect to teachers' salaries ...
Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid.
Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined
far more by seniority."
"Unions are disingenuous when they claim to represent the interests of the students.
ThatÕs not what they were created to do and is not what they are paid by their members to do."
"Education will always do whatever makes the parents most
uncomfortable, that's their forte."
"The soft bigotry of low expectations"
"Parents give up their rights when they drop their kids off at public school"
"The federal government does not own our children.
Yet we act as if it does by letting it decide when,
how, and what our children will learn."
"Traditional public schools view parents less as partners than as
ATMs. Only 4% of American education schools offer courses on working
with parents. Journalist Elinor Burkett estimates that the typical
principal must comply with 470,000 federal, state, and local
regulations. After all that bureaucracy, principals have no energy
left over to work with parents -- better to distract them with bake
sales."
There is no accountability in the public school system - except for
coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him.
A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.
"Will allowing parents to choose from different education
options 'destroy public education'? Did competition from Toyota 'destroy'
General Motors? Or to use an even closer analogy: Has competition from
Federal Express 'destroyed' the government postal service, or has the
latter indeed become better, faster, more innovative in response? ...
[Beware those who] wave their worn-out ideologies to defend a system
of educational apartheid while demonizing anyone who promotes a parent's
right to choose."
"...the traditional school district is one of the largest obstacles to improving
the public schools. Today's district is a rigid command-and-control system
that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don't like the
district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them."
"...the seemingly obvious, but too often ignored, truth [is] that
effective teaching depend mostly on a teacher's knowledge of the instructional
material, not on possessing an education degree."
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the government's purposes are beneficial."
"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people
by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent
and sudden usurpations."
"Whenever there is no absolute necessity, whenever legislation may
fail to intervene without society being overthrown, whenever, finally
it is a question merely of some hypothetical improvement, the law
must abstain, leave things alone, and keep quiet."
"I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases
with himself and the fruit of his labor so far as it in no way interferes
with any other man's rights."
"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."
"I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man ... Mankind is
so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his
fellows."
"I'm not aware of any study that says merit pay has really enhanced productivity"
"He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins."
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
"In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant,
the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner.
It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success."
"I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
"Focusing on the future of public education in terms of the existing public
school system is like discussing the eradication of poverty declaring that
the top priority must be the preservation of the Department of Health and
Human Services, or discussing the future of America's farmers in terms of
whether or not policies will strengthen the Department of Agriculture. ...
it is a measure of the level of the educational debate that the educrats
have been able to frame the debate on effective schools in such nakedly
bureaucrat-o-centric terms."
"The fact is, when we say 'All students can learn,' we should mean
it and measure it."
"The reason so many charter schools sprouted in Arizona so quickly is that,
once again, we bypassed the school districts. The early charter movement
floundered a decade ago because most states forced schools to obtain
charters from local school boards. No surprise that charters weren't
springing up fast: this would be like Burger King asking for
permission to sell Whoppers in the local McDonald's. There's just not
going to be any enthusiasm to help out the competition." "Charter schools are just public schools on a slightly longer leash. A dog on a long leash is still a dog on a leash." -- Marshall Fritz
"After that, the Head's friends saw that the Head was no use as a
Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other
Heads. And when they found she wasn't much good even at that, they
got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after."
Ed Unions"Calling itself an education association is like calling the United Auto Workers union a driving association."-- Columnist Patrick Chisholm, referring to NEA, Christian Science Monitor, August 24, 2005
"If the United States is to preserve our system of free public schools,
teacher unions are going to have to stop accepting the status quo and
making excuses for the poor performance of our students."
"We must face the fact that some of the right-wing critique of public
education, particularly their criticism of the ever inflating costs
of public education, resonates with the American public because it is
true, or at least truer than some of the blather put out by the
people who run the schools and the unions who represent the people
who work in them."
"Kids learning É..is secondary to the other goals."
"Creating our future together through collective thinking and conversation."
"My view is that 'collective thinking' is an oxymoron, and that
conversation in the midst of it is pointless, but can there be any
doubt that NEA prizes collective thinking above all other things?
Congratulations, NEA, for creating a slogan that describes your very
essence."
"Education is an issue on the front page of most news outlets daily.
Yet I search but cannot find anyone reporting the relationship between teacher
unions and educational failure. Most agree that 'Johnny can't read' but
fail to see that Johnny is wearing a union label on his sweet little empty
head. Teacher unions are a monopoly. They engage in illegal political
activity and, by their very design, do not act in the students' best
interest. The union wants to grow its membership and strength. How does it
go about doing this? Hire more teachers to do less so more teachers are
needed."
"A strike of public employees manifests
nothing less than an attempt on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of government
until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of government by
those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable."
"The teachers union apparently exists in some alternate universe where everyone is rewarded
equally regardless of the quality of their work."
"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have
become unionized in the worst possible way. ...
This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy. ...
What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that
when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?"
Homeschooling"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?"-- Stephen Arons, Compelling Belief, McGraw-Hill, 1983 "It is better to tolerate that rare instance of a parent's refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings by a forcible transportation and education of the infant against the will of his father." -- Thomas Jefferson
"To read the Latin and Greek authors in their original is a sublime luxury ...
I thank on my knees him [Jefferson's father] who directed my early
education for having put into my possession this rich source of delight."
"I hope our successors will turn their attention to the advantages of education. I mean
education on the broad scale, and not that of the petty academies. The Constitution and Schools"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."-- 10th amendment, part of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground:
That 'all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states
or to the people.'
To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around
the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field
of power no longer suceptible to any definition."
"There is no Constitutional authority for the federal government
to be involved in education in any way whatsoever."
"Powers not accorded to Congress by the Constitution are reserved, by
the 10th Amendment, to the states and the people. As it happens, the
U.S. Constitution mentions neither the word 'education' nor the word
'school'. Doesn't even allude to them."
"Our nation was not built on a foundation of federal, or even
state-level, intervention in schooling. It was founded on locally
operated independent and semi-public schools that were directly
responsible to the families they served."
"Education has never been a national responsibility in our country,
and school systems should not be operated by an agency in
Washington."
"Search the Constitution as you will, you
will find no authority for Congress to
appropriate and spend federal funds on
education"
"If the Framers intended that the 'general welfare' clause have the
interpretation placed on it by today's congressmen, they could have
spared themselves considerable grief and contentiousness during that
hot, humid Philadelphia summer in 1787. They could have simply said:
'Congress shall promote the general welfare.' That would be our
Constitution. Forget all that business about separation of powers,
prohibitions against Congress interfering with freedom of speech, and
assembly and religion, taking private property and speedy trials.
Congress would just promote what a majority of its members saw as the
general welfare."
"On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when
the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the
debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the
text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
"[We must] no longer hide behind our love of local control of schools..." Jefferson on government and education"But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty."-- Thomas Jefferson, education plan from his Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation
of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical;
even forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious
persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his
contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern." "It [should not] be proposed to take ordinary branches [of education] out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal." -- Thomas Jefferson, sixth annual message to Congress, 1806
"It is better for the public to procure at the market
whatever the market can supply; because there it is by competition
kept up in quality, and reduced to its minimum price."
"If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor
and council, the commissioners of the literary fund, or any other general authority
of the government, than by the
parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.
Try the principle one step further and amend the bill so as to commit to the governor
and council the management of all our farms, our mills, and merchants'
stores. No my friend, the way to have good and safe government is not to
trust it all to one but to divide it among the many,
distributing to everyone exactly the functions he is competent to."
"If twelve or fifteen hundred schools are to be placed
under one general administration, an attention so divided will amount
to a dereliction of them to themselves ... It is surely better, then,
to place each school at once under the care of those most interested
in its conduct."
School Boards
-- Lisa Graham Keegan, former Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Arizona
"The traditional school district is one of the biggest obstacles to
improving the public schools. Today's district is a rigid command-and-control
system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don't like
the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them."
"...it has continued to amaze me that the concept of customer service
doesn't seem to have ever sunk into enterprises like school boards in general."
"School boards are an aberration, an anachronism, an educational sinkhole ...
Put this dysfunctional arrangement out of its misery."
"Contract restrictions are something about which school board members
often complain. But, wait. How do these provisions get into the contract?
Why, of course. The school boards agree to them. But they don't talk about that."
"Many conservatives cling nostalgically to the notion
of 'local control' of education. ... But local school boards ... provide perhaps the greatest example of the
inefficiency and dysfunctions of any government entities
in the United States ..."
"If education isn't our mission and if we don't have anything worthwhile to say,
then school boards are the managed living dead and we can hardly ask the
public to see us as necessary."
"The near-impossibility of true educational reform has been documented in a number of studies ...
Now that I'm off the board and able to think more calmly, it is even clearer
to me that the system can't be rehabilitated, only replaced."
""'Nature,' as H. L. Mencken so insightfully put it, 'abhors a moron.' The same
obviously cannot be said of school boards who often hire them." Definition of "micromanagement": asking about details that the superintendent wants to keep quiet.
"In 1930 there were 200,000 school boards in the United States.
Today, with twice as many citizens and three times as many
students in our public schools, we have only 15,000.
Once one of every 500 citizens sat on a school board;
today it's one out of nearly 20,000.
Once most of us knew a school board member personally; today it's rare to know one." Values, Character, Drugs
-- John Taylor Gatto, "A Curriculum beyond Money," The LINK, vol. 5, no. 3.
"To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society."
"For every religious American who wants the schools to push religion,
a move that would be clearly unconstitutional, there are probably 10 who have
something much more modest in mind: protecting their children
from an educational system that promotes values profoundly at odds with their
religious convictions"
"To suggest for a moment that morality and ethics are not being taught in
government-controlled schools is ridiculous.... A definite point-of-view
from a definite culture is being imposed.... It is outrageous that values
taught in public schools are not the same ones held by Catholic parents,
or by non-Catholic Christians and Jewish parents as well."
"The most urgent need today is not attention to material poverty.
The real poverty in our society is intellectual."
"You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school."
"Every time I pass a jailhouse or a school, I feel sorry for the people inside."
"Most of the institutions now run by the state are a kind of jail. People do
not choose to go into them and cannot choose to leave. They are there
because other people, for reasons of their own, put them there, and they
stay until other people, again for their own reasons, decide to let them
out. This invites abuse and tyranny. But if the people in communities can
leave if they don't like them, those who run them will have to run them to
suit their clients, or have no clients."
"Peer-orientation is an explanation for much that is happening in our society,
including why teaching is getting harder, parenting is getting more difficult,
aggression among children is increasing, children are less deferring and
bullying is increasing. It is a dynamic that touches everyone, whether involved
with children or not."
"There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort
of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned
to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to
drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of
friendship and peers."
"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."
"In other cultures parents cite things like
becoming a good spouse and parent, good citizenship, or
kindness and sensitivity as their chief goals for their children.
What do Americans want for their children?
In every study, one stark answer predominates: independence."
"The anti-cultural fallacy has prevented educators from realizing
the simple fact that, rather than motivating children, the appeal to excitement
and creativity distracts and overstimulates them."
"Educators find that an increasing number of children fail to
notice other people in the most ordinary encounters.
'Kids will walk right in front of you while you're talking to someone,'
one principal of a New York suburban middle school told me.
'That's not new. What is new is that when you point it out to them,
they don't know what you're talking about.'"
"Religion, morality and knowledge being essential to good government,
schools shall be established in the Northwest Territories."
"To compel a man to furnish contributions for the propagation of
opinions which he disbelieves or abhors is sinful and tyrannical."
"In schools the principles of morality should be intermingled with
the principles of science"
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the
public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." From The Simpsons: Principal Skinner: [Over PA system] Attention. All honor students will be rewarded with a trip to an archeological dig! "Drug Education""At best, the program is not effective. At worst, it promotes drug use. ... If we finance the program, we're doing a disservice to our kids."-- John Noverini, Kane County (IL) board member, explaining why the board refused to fund DARE
"[DARE shows] little evidence...of any extended impact"
"Over the past 14 years, there have been more than a dozen
studies showing DARE does not work for drug prevention."
"A National Academy of Sciences study showed DARE did not
affect children's drug use or attitude about drugs, nor
did it instill resistance to peer pressure or boost self-esteem."
"This isn't about sentimentality ... It's not about making
us feel good. It's not about asking our kids what makes
them feel good after they graduate from DARE. It's about science.
It's about results. DARE is clearly not the answer and we
need to face up to it."
"The question is, can we overcome the rhetoric to see what the
evidence is telling us? ...
"In study after study, we find programs like these don't work.
DARE has been involved in a massive expansion regardless of
whether the science bears the expansion worthy."
"DARE relies on the old 'values clarification' approach
(trendy in the '70s, but now generally discredited) wherein
children are not told what is right or wrong, or permissible or
impermissible, but rather they are "helped to prize and act upon
their own freely chosen values," in the words of a 1975
educational psychology textbook. Thus DARE does not tell
children that they must not use drugs. Instead, DARE tells
them that they have the 'right to say no,' implying that they
have the 'right to say yes.'
"We dropped it [DARE] because there was no formal proof -- no
statistics that showed we were getting any benefit out of it"
"The research overwhelmingly points to the fact that it [DARE] doesn't
have any effect on long-term prevention ...
Most of the studies demonstrate that it doesn't have any effect. Period. ...
I personally think the program is a waste of time"
"[DARE is] a feel-good program ... It's good P.R. to get police
interacting with the children. But there's no hard data to support
its long-term effect on keeping kids off drugs and alcohol."
Ritalin"Neither animals nor humans can tell the difference between cocaine, amphetamines, or methylphenidate [Ritalin] when they are administered the same way at comparable doses. In short, they produce effects that are nearly identical."-- Terrance Woodworth, deputy director of the DEA's office of diversion control, testifying in May 2000 before a Congressional committee
"We were surprised as hell ... We didn't expect this. Instead
of being a less potent transport inhibitor than cocaine, methylphenidate was
more potent. ... The data clearly show that the notion that Ritalin
is a weak stimulant is completely incorrect."
"Why is 80 percent of the world's methylphenidate being fed to children?"
"Because people with low levels of dopamine receptors are at risk
for drug addiction, Volkow said that researchers need to understand
if methylphenidate [Ritalin] can alter the whole dynamic of the dopamine pathway.
'Could chronic use of Ritalin make you more vulnerable to decreased
dopamine brain activity as cocaine does? It's a key question
nobody has answered.'"
"Education today is mixing drugs with student control. In years past, if a child
was acting up or caught staring out the window, he or she received a
rap on the knuckles with a ruler and was told to stay with the rest
of the class. Today, the child is sent to the school nurse, who
oftentimes tells the parents the student has attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and recommends the administration of
Prozac (94% sodium fluroide) or Ritalin, psychotropic drugs that have
been shown to produce psychosis in lab rats."
"The first long-term effort to track stimulant therapy in a large
population of children has generated disturbing results.
In particular, ... most 9-to-16-year-olds
receiving Ritalin or other stimulants don't exhibit attention-deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the only condition for which such
drugs are approved. ... more than half of all stimulant users in
the study fell short of even a relaxed definition of ADHD.
"Yes, they have proved and we've known for decades that Ritalin
alters/damages/changes the brain. ...
All this research [from Volkow at BNL] says to me is that 9 million
children diagnosed as having ADHD are being damaged by Ritalin just
as with cocaine and every other psychotropic drug."
"Yes, Ritalin works. It enables our children to survive. It puts
an end to the problem of too many questions. It stops us asking
what message we give children when we give them drugs. It saves us
thinking about why they can't learn, or focusing on creating an environment
that makes them healthy and happy. It's our magic pill."
Scheduling of School DayBlock Scheduling"Students in semestered courses in secondary science in British Columbia do not score as well on reliable and valid, standardized science instruments measuring academic performance derived from course objectives. ... The research described above included a very large number of students (over 28,000!!) and the results left absolutely no doubt based on probability of error (one has to go out to the 10th decimal place to find anything but 0's in the probabilities!!) While there may be many advantages to semestered timetables and course structures, ... the academic performance of students appears to suffer. Every other piece of research on this subject that I am aware of is based on testimonials, and not on actual student performance data. Based upon what I found during that study, and from examining the data of subsequent assessments, I cannot academically support a semestered timetable."-- David J. Bateson, Ed.D., Univ. of British Columbia, reporting on his study of 28,000 students in a "semestered" schedule in which a year's worth of material is covered in a single semester with double-length periods.
"Texas Education Agency researchers say they can find no proof
that longer class periods -- used in the block scheduling approach
in Texas high schools -- have resulted in improved student learning.
The findings are contained in a new 54-page study prepared by the TEA's
research and evaluation division ... The authors also acknowledged the
arguments of critics who complained that block scheduling actually
reduces instructional time over the school year -- and that teacher
and student concentration is weakened over a 90-minute period."
"What a waste!..I vote no! Block scheduling is great for administrators...
not teachers and students."
"...why can't (we find) even one well-designed, peer-reviewed,
longitudinal study showing that in the long run Block Scheduling
actually helps academic performance?"
"One of the most dependable findings from psychology holds up in
classroom research: that 'spaced' practice over several lessons...
is superior to equal amounts of time spent in 'massed' practice"
"My ... son was placed in a pilot program in 6th grade for block scheduling.
Classes met for 90-minute periods 3 days per week... This program has since
been discontinued ....it didn't work. In nearly every class, again,
the last 20-30 minutes were used for homework.
... The students have a difficult time concentrating on one subject
for the full 90 minutes. Most parents I spoke to about this were also
dissatisfied with the children's progress. Again, the lack of continuity
seemed to be a major problem....especially in math classes, where
continuity and daily practice are essential to successfully mastering
the material."
"I teach 7th grade English on an A/B block schedule this year, but our
superintendent just announced a change back to 7-period days for next year.
"The school that I teach at participates in a Math Rally every spring. For
the past seven years ALL the schools that use block scheduling finish at the
bottom, by rather sizable margins, no less. Since the beginning of the
competition, no block schedule school has ever won or taken second.
Length of School Day"There's no hard research we've been able to find over the years that more or less time in school is any more effective"-- Jamie Ferrare, dean, School of Education, Drake University
"It's not so much the time that's important, but what you do with that time.
For how much of that time will students be actively engaged
in meaningful learning? They could just be bored for 30 more minutes."
"A recent Des Moines Register Iowa Poll showed that 69 percent of
Iowans were strongly or somewhat opposed to lengthening the school day."
"One of the most comprehensive studies on use of time in schools was
by the National Education Commission on Time and Leaning, which issued
the report "Prisoners of Time" in 1994. It found several problems
with school time, including the proliferation of nonacademic
activities, such as education about personal safety,
consumer affairs, AIDS, conservation and energy and the demands
of athletics and clubs."
Reading
-- Frederick Douglass.
"Our system fails to teach children many fundamental skills like reading,
and then inappropriately identifies some of them as learning disabled."
"A new study by the National Research Council shows ... nearly one in eight
students are now labelled as 'disabled.'"
"If my school district is wasting about $7 million per year because
classroom teachers do not know how or do not like to teach kids how to read
with methods and programs that we know work from the get-go, how much do you
think is being wasted worldwide?"
"Widespread uses of Direct Instruction would directly benefit children
and parents [and] decrease the need for remedial reading
programs in the state. Potential cost savings [could]
yield savings of [as much as] $107 million."
"Accuracy is not an essential goal of reading." Literature"Children who know only superheroes will find real heroes boring or incomprehensible, and when they come to maturity, if they ever do, it will be without the formerly natural habit of wishing to emulate their heroes. How do you emulate Harry Potter?"-- James Bowman
"In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among
others, but by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our
children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively."
"An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth -- scrutinizing what we mainly
present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the
comics, and many books -- might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them
murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it
and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society
could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?"
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
Social StudiesHISTORY"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."-- L.P. Hartley (1953)
"The further you get away from any period the better you can write about it.
You aren't subject to interruptions by people that were there."
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set
for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among
savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and
easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and
persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians."
"We are raising a generation of young Americans who are
by-and-large historically illiterate. And it's not their fault."
"We have to get across the idea that we have to know who we were
if we're to know who we are and where we're headed."
"But most [history textbooks], it appears to me, have been published in order to kill any
interest that anyone might have in history. I think that students would be better
served by cutting out all the pages, clipping up all the page numbers, mixing
them all up and then asking students to put the pages back together in the right
order. The textbooks are dreary, they're done by committee, they're often
hilariously politically correct and they're not doing any good."
"We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate. ...
I know how much these young people -- even at the most esteemed
institutions of higher learning -- don't know. It's shocking."
"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act"
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future."
"Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future."
"When else in history would you find 'educated' people who know more about sports
than about the history of their country..." "The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." -- Paul Johnson, British historian (from The Quotable Paul Johnson: A Topical Compilation of His Wit, Wisdom and Satire, edited by George J. Marlin)
"To know nothing of what happened before you
were born is to remain ever a child" "Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again." -- Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, p. 101.
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
"My own in-house youth consultant, my son, is almost 13 and knows
with astonishing details the genealogy of Frodo Baggins from
Lord of the Rings or the battles of Luke Skywalker's rebellion
against the Empire in Star Wars. Yet, he did not know until
recently that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin.
He knows because I told him. 'They don't teach us much history
in school, Dad,' he said."
"A history of only horrors cannot inspire."
"The West was not settled by men and women who had taken
courses in 'How to be a pioneer.'"
"How can a citizen be called educated if he has been trained to
misunderstand the world?"
"We must not lose touch with what we were, with what we had been,
nor must we allow the well of our history to dry up, for a child
without tradition is a child crippled before the world.
Tradition can also be an anchor of stability and a shield to guard
one from irresponsibility and hasty decision."
"To look to the future we must first look back upon the past.
That is where the seeds of the future were planted."
"...The presently taught curriculum in the social sciences in the
early grades is a disservice to the students and a shame for the
educational system ...
Children of this age are sufficiently surrounded by the realities
of their lives. ... What children of this age need is rich food for
their imagination, or a sense of history, how the present situation
came about. ... What formed the culture of the past, such as myths,
is of interest and value to them, because these myths reflect how
people tried to make sense of the world."
"For most Americans, all history is ancient history and the best thing
about the past is that it's over."
"[The elementary social studies curriculum] "expresses a contempt
for children's intelligence. ...
Much more is to be gained by teaching disciplined historical
thinking than by having [students] engage, while conceptually
unprepared, the crucial issues that beset our society at the present."
"There is a greater lesson to be learned from the 50-year-old
social studies experiment. Using economic and social conditions
of the 1930s as justification, proponents of social studies
created an 'integrated' curriculum that robbed several generations
of a solid education in history."
"[Students] are aware that someone oppressed someone else,
but they aren't sure exactly what took place and they have no idea
of the order in which it happened."
"The farther back you can look, the farther forward you can see."
"No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods
which are constantly mentioned to the period of our own short lives.
Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon for most people. Fifty years is antiquity.
To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must
first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of their own lives."
"What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been
wrong innumerable times, by vast amounts, and with catastrophic results.
Yet today there are still people who think that anyone who disagrees
with them must be either bad or not know what he is talking about."
"You cannot survive if you do not know the past."
"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."
GEOGRAPHY"I studied geography in the fifth grade, and I remember that instead of just TELLING us where things were, the teacher insisted that we make relief maps of the United States by mixing flour and water into a paste and smearing it on a shirt cardboard so as to form important geographical features such as the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, Disneyland, etc. ... As a direct result, I grew up, like most Americans, with a poor grasp of geography."-- Dave Barry
"There is something in maps which attracts everybody, even the smallest children.
When they are tired of everything else, they will still learn something by means
of maps. And this is a good amusement for children ... We might really begin with
geography in teaching children."
"Geography, I think, should be begun with: for the learning of the figure
of the globe, the situation and boundaries of the four parts of the world, and
that of particular kingdoms and countries, being only an exercise of the eyes and
memory, a child with pleasure will learn and retain them; and this is so certain,
that I now live in the house with a child whom his mother has so well instructed
this way in geography that he knew the limits of the four parts of the world,
could readily point, being asked, to any country upon the globe or any county in
the map of England, knew all the great rivers, promontories, straits, and bays in
the world, and could find the longitude and latitude of any place before he was
six years old.
These things, that he will thus learn by sight, and have by rote in his memory,
are not all, I confess, that he is to learn upon the globes. But yet it is a good
step and preparation to it, and will make the remainder much easier, when his
judgment is grown ripe enough for it."
CURRICULUM AND CONTENT"The more closely I examined the social studies curriculum, the more my attention was drawn to the curious nature of the early grades, which is virtually content-free. The social studies curriculum for he K-3 grades is organized around the study of the relationships within the home, school, neighborhood, and local community. This curriculum of "me, my family, my school, my community" now dominates the early grades in American public education. It contains no mythology, legends, biographies, hero tales, or great events in the life of this nation or any other. It is tot sociology."-- Diane Ravitch, "Tot Sociology: What Happened to History in the Grade Schools?"
"In the course of my research, I was told by many educators that
the present K-3 curriculum was based on years of educational research.
No one was able to point to any specific research, but they assumed
that it was validated by the developmental studies of Jean Piaget.
However, Piagetian theory is about how children learn, not what
they are taught. In fact, Piagetian theory permits teachers to
teach virtually any content so long as they proceed from the
concrete to the abstract."
"Leading scholars in the fields of cognitive psychology,
child development, and curriculum theory know of no research
justifying the expanding environments approach. In fact, they
make repeated references to the 'vacuousness' and the 'sterility'
of the content offered to young children in their social studies classes.
"The aim of history is to educate ... the aim of social studies is socialization"
"Our challenge and responsibility are clear. If we would desire good
citizenship, love of country, respect for heritage among our young, then we
must teach them. And we must do so actively, consistently, and most of all
early. It is essential that we provide children with an environment conducive
to the learning about, practicing of, and valuing of good citizenship and
responsible involvement in national life.
Children should be surrounded with reminders of our heritage as a nation and
with the symbols of our loyalty. They will learn patriotic reverence best if
they see it practiced by adults. They will learn how to be good citizens if
they are encouraged and shown how good citizens respond to given situations,
if they are provided opportunities to use this knowledge."
"The training of the intellect was meant to produce an intrinsic pleasure and
satisfaction, but it also had practical goals of importance to the individual and
the entire community, to make the humanistically trained individuals eloquent and
wise, to know what is good and to practice virtue, both in private and public
life. Such was the understanding of the ancient Greeks and of the Renaissance
humanists, but not, I fear of many teachers of the humanities
today, who deny the possibility of knowing anything with confidence, of the
reality of such concepts as truth and virtue, who seek only gain and pleasure in
the modern guise of political power and self-gratification as the ends of
education."
ECONOMICS"People who decry the fact that businesses are in business 'just to make money' seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want."-- Thomas Sowell
"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to fully
satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson
of economics."
"Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left
would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of
wealth. But you would be wrong."
"It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it 'greed' to want to keep what you
have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and
let politicians use it to buy votes."
"Much confusion comes from judging economic policies by the goals they proclaim
rather than the incentives they create."
Math and ScienceMathematics
-- Voltaire (L'homme aux quarante écus)
"Strange as it sounds, the power of mathematics rests on its
evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving
of mental operations."
"A mastered algorithm in the hands of a student is an incomparable tool
laying bare the conceptual structure of the mathematical problems that
the algorithm solves. With such tools, and with the guidance of good
teachers in their use, a student can grasp and integrate in twelve
years a body of mathematics that it has taken hundreds of geniuses
thousands of years to devise."
"Piaget's constructivism and Bourbaki's austere rigor have left their marks
on our schools. Will such trenchant educational theories ever give way
to more serene and better optimized teaching methods, based on a genuine
understanding of how the human mind does mathematics?"
"Discovery lessons, students writing to learn mathematics, the teaching of
so-called general problem-solving concepts, field trips, math lab lessons,
alternative assessments, collaborative partner tests, student presentations, and
open-ended problems should all be used sparingly. I use some of them, but they
have limited value. Pencil-and -paper analytic solutions are the heart of
mathematics education."
"These thoughts did not come in any verbal formulation. I rarely
think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express
it in words afterward."
"The mathematics background that elementary school teachers typically
receive is atrocious -- little or none"
"Nothing flies more in the face of the last 20 years of research than the
assertion that practice is bad. All evidence, from the laboratory and from
extensive case studies of professionals, indicates that real competence only
comes with extensive practice. ... In denying the critical role of practice one
is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence."
"...varied and repeated practice leading to rapid recall and automaticity
is necessary to higher-order problem-solving skills in both mathematics
and the sciences. ... lack of automaticity places limits on the
mind's channel capacity for higher-order problem-solving skills. ...
only intelligently directed and repeated practice, leading to fast,
automatic recall of math facts, and facility in computation and
algebraic manipulation can one lead to effective real-world problem solving.
... [These conclusions are based on] reliable facts, figures,
and documentation ... not just from isolated lab experiments, but
also from large-scale classroom results."
"Computational algorithms, the manipulation of expressions, and paper-and-pencil drill must no longer dominate school mathematics."
"The NCTM denigrates the idea of practice, which is thoughtful, considered repetition,
and confuses it with drill, which is blind, mindless repetition."
"If you have one bucket that contains two gallons and another bucket
that contains seven gallons, how many buckets do you have?"
"Numbers rule all things."
"There's math. Everything else is debatable."
"Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know."
"In the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand
what you're doing rather than to get the right answer."
"So you've got thirteen ...
"Presumably no one would argue that the conservative view on the
sum of 14 and 27 differs from the liberal view."
"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling
as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature... If you want to learn about
nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she
speaks in."
"Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe."
"This notion that one has to 'interest' students in mathematics in
order to make them do it has gone much too far, to the point where
real mathematics in many cases has just disappeared entirely from the
courses. They're just a discussion of what mathematics does and
beautiful pictures and imprecise ideas."
"Belief is no substitute for arithmetic."
"Newsrooms are full of English majors who acknowledge that they are not good at
math, but still rush to make confident pronouncements about a global-warming
'crisis' and the coming of bird flu."
"My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle
against the program. Whatever I've achieved, I've achieved in spite
of it. Kids do not do better learning math themselves. There's a
reason we go to school, which is that there's someone smarter than us
with something to teach us."
"It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols,
each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value;
a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit.
But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic
in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement
the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius,
two of the greatest men produced by antiquity."
"Well, the math stuff I was fine with up until 7th grade. But Malia is now a freshman in High School and IÕm pretty lost. ItÕs tough."
Science
-- Michael Crichton, author, M.D. Harvard University
"Consensus science isn't science."
"For we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do."
"One must not assume that an understanding of science is present
in those who borrow its language."
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
"Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of
boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers,
ignorant generals -- the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically
altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all."
"I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time,
I see much more in the flower [than my artist friend]. I can imagine
the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There's beauty not just at the
dimension of one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimension.
... There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge
of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower.
It only adds, I don't understand how it subtracts."
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
"Mathematics is the door and key to the sciences"
"If it cannot be expressed in figures, it is not science, it is opinion."
"No human inquiry can be called science unless it pursues its path
through mathematical exposition and demonstration."
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively
assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds
new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
"All science as it grows toward perfection becomes mathematical in its ideas"
"...every effort is made to inject cultural content into math and science classes in order to appease the demand for
'relevant' content -- no matter how irrelevant such material may be."
"Unlike other belief systems, those of science are universal and
culture-free. If the history of science were rerun it would take
a different course but the conclusions would be the same - DNA
would still be the genetic material, hydrogen would still be the
most common element in the universe, and stars would still be powered
by nuclear fusion."
"I began to wonder some years ago why my children were learning
science in such a crazy fashion. ... At a PTA
meeting, I protested and was told that this was the new fashion in
education. None of the other parents, I was informed, had made any
complaint, except the ones who were scientists. This circumstance
seemed to me to indicate a problem."
"I once did an analysis of a district science curriculum which,
like most American curricula, had a hands-on, formalistic, process orientation
and found that students did a hands-on study of seeds in four different
grades but were never required to learn about photosynthesis at all."
The So-Called "Scientific Method"
What Real Scientists Actually Do"I do not frame hypotheses"-- Isaac Newton
"It has become fashionable in science education to mold K-12
students around an idee fixe of a modern scientist;
formulating hypotheses, observing measuring, and discovering
through hands-on investigations.
What has been left unsaid is that real scientists don't
actually spend very much of their day 'observing' and 'measuring.'
They read! Reading for understanding of content is the core
process skill of science, and there is no substitute for
practice at an early age. ...
"A scientist works largely by intuition. Given enough experience,
a scientist examining a problem can leap to an intuition as to
what the solution 'should look like.' ...
Science is ultimately based on insight, not logic."
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the
most discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny...'"
"In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind."
"Research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing"
Prof. Barnhardt: "You have tested this theory?" Some quotes from "On Scientific Method", by Percy W. Bridgman, from his "Reflections of a Physicist" (1955): Science Is About KnowingOur English word "science" is derived from the Latin word scientia, which means "knowledge". It does not mean "method" or "discovery."-- editor "Science is the knowledge of consequences, and the dependence of facts upon one another." -- Thomas Hobbes
"Having students formulate and carry out experiments is an important part of
their education. That is why schools sponsor science fairs. However, making this
the main curriculum is misguided. In doing research, students learn facts at a
snail's pace. If they are ever to become scientists, they need to stand on the
shoulders of those who came before them."
"There comes a time, starting in middle school or high school, when students
must acquire a body of knowledge. How can they do this and still have the
hands-on science that everyone is calling for? Hands-on science moves far too
slowly for them to acquire a body of knowledge."
"Many of the popular hands-on kits in current use provide no
reading materials for students at all, and this is the fulfillment
of the constructivists' dream. For everyone else it is a nightmare. ...
Computers in Schools
-- Alan Kay, legendary computer scientist at Xerox and Apple
"'Technology' is stuff that doesn't work yet."
"On close examination, kids are doing nothing of real
importance on computers, and they'd be much better off
doing something else."
"Want to get a job using information technology to solve problems?
"A 1996 poll of US teachers found that they ranked computer skills and
media technology as more 'essential' than the study of European history,
biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as
drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than
reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemmingway or classic
ones such as Plato and Shakespeare."
"Given the high costs and clear hazards, we call for a moratorium
on the further introduction of computers in early childhood and
elementary education."
"Much computer use in schools these days involves computer 'enhanced'
instruction -- things like simulations ... There's no evidence that this helps
to the degree that promoters promise ... I remain a skeptic because
so many claims have been made without questioning."
"What we are really seeing ... is a conflict between
techno-enthusiasts and teachers who are comfortable with the human role
they have become used to playing without the machine to interfere."
"...There is no clear, commanding body of evidence that students'
sustained use of multimedia machines, the Internet, word processing,
spreadsheets, and other popular applications has any impact on academic
achievement."
"Anyone who tells you computers are more effective than anything else
is either dumb or lying."
"The biggest problem that students have is that technology
often ends up being a distraction.
In an information society the smart person will be the one who
can shut out all the distractions."
"Our students, twenty years from now, will be using the concepts, tools, and technology,
that they will learn fifteen years from now."
"If computers make a difference, it has yet to show up in achievement."
"There is absolutely no evidence that the internet or the use of
computers in and out of the classroom enhance education in any way -- skills,
infamous 'information', maybe -- but not knowledge, not real learning."
"Try not to be intimidated by people who claim that children
will be left behind or ill prepared for the computer age unless
they are exposed to the computer early on. People who say such
things are invariably trying to sell you something."
"There is a consensus that except for a few futuristic demonstration
projects, all of this money [spent on computerization] and hardware
has had an insignificant effect on educational practice in the
nation's schools."
"Today's children are the subjects of a vast and optimistic experiment.
It is well financed and enthusiastically supported by major corporations,
the public at large, and government officials around the world.
If it is successful, our youngsters' minds and lives will be enriched,
society will benefit, and education will be permanently changed for
the better. But there is no proof -- or even convincing evidence --
that it will work."
"[Clinton's] pledge [to wire all schools to the Internet]
came despite ambiguous existing research on the effectiveness of such
technology in the classroom. There are few hard facts to demonstrate
that computers improve student achievement despite the nearly absolute
faith that the administration appeared to place in technology.
"I used to think technology could help education.
Now my inevitable conclusion is that no amount of technology will make a dent."
"In the 4th grade, students who used computers at school for
social studies every day scored a whopping 47 points lower
that students who 'never or hardly ever' used computers at
school for social studies. The margin for both 8th and 12th
graders was 24 points. The trend was virtually unbroken for
all three grade levels: the more frequently you used a
computer at school for social studies, the lower you scored."
"Where did we get this preposterous notion that young children
need computers lest they somehow fall behind?"
"Throughout the country, computer technology is dumbing down the academic
experience, corrupting schools' financial integrity, cheating the poor, fooling
people about the job skills youngsters need for the future and furthering the
illusions of state and federal education policy."
A library is where you go to find facts. The web is more like
a garage sale: it's possible you'll find what you want, but
only with a lot of digging, searching, and wading through things
that smell funny.
"The key to helping the next generation of American children be
bright, literate, intellectually self-sufficient, steeped in
the most important areas of knowledge? It all comes down to computers
in the classrooms. Get rid of them."
"Educational television should be absolutely forbidden.
It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your
child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not
leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens." "It is appallingly obvious our technology has exceeded our humanity." -- Albert Einstein
"The web is just a device by which bad ideas travel around
the globe at the speed of light."
"This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how
sheep's bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes."
"Kids are the best ... you can teach them to hate the things you hate,
and they practically raise themselves what with the Internet and all."
"If it's in the computer, they believe anything."
PowerPoint"Then we learned about bullets -- little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on the slides."-- Richard Feynman, physicist and Nobel laureate, on the use of dumbed-down presentations during his participation on the board investigating the explosion of the Challenger
"It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint
slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.
At many points during its investigation, the Board was surprised
to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place
of technical reports. The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint
briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the
problematic methods of technical communication at NASA."
"PowerPoint can make anything look respectable no matter how badly prepared or dull."
"Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being
taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials."
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce
the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
"Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into
schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make
client pitches and infomercials, which is better than encouraging children to
smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher's guides, and in
student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of
clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides -- a total of
perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than
being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PP Phluff and foreshortening of thought,
students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and
everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining
something."
"At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm to the
content. Yet again and again we have seen that the PP cognitive style
routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content."
"The Harvard Business Review study of corporate planning found that the widely
used bullet outlines did not bring intellectual discipline to planning -- instead
the bullets accommodated the generic, superficial, and simplistic."
"Presentations largely stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and
integrity of the content. The way to make big improvements in a presentation is
to get better content. Designer formats will not salvage weak content. If your
numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images
are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience
boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure."
"By playing around with Phluff rather than providing information,
PowerPoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real
talk, and the audiences to pretend that they are listening. This
prankish conspiracy against substance and thought should always
provoke the question, 'Why are we having this meeting?'"
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
"Is there anything so deadening to the soul as a PowerPoint presentation?"
History of Education
Deweyisms"You can't make Socialists out of individualists ... children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent."-- John Dewey
"Independent self-reliant people would be a
counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of
the future where people will be defined by their
associations."
"I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of
his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the
maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the
right social growth."
"It is one of the great mistakes of education to make
reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work
for the first two years."
"Dependency denotes a power rather than a weakness. There is
always the danger that increased personal independence will decrease the
social capacity of an individual."
"In making him self-reliant ... it often makes an
individual ... develop an illusion of being really able to
stand and act alone - an un-named form of insanity which is
responsible for a large part of the suffering of the
world."
"Educational theory ... must contest the notion that morals are
something wholly separate from and above science and scientific method."
"I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic
ideal ... is possible without the surrender of the conception
of the basic division of good and evil."
Early America"A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance ... as a comet or an earthquake."-- John Adams
A Hundred Years of Failed School Reforms"[Herbert] Spencer is unreadable today ... but his immense prestige in his time [1820-1903], which extended as far as Russia, is a clear proof that complete ignorance of human nature will not necessarily prevent a man from becoming an acknowledged expert upon it."-- A. O. J. Cockshut, literary historian, quoted by Kieran Egan in "Getting It Wrong From the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance From Herbert Spencer, John Dewey and Jean Piaget" "Too many fads palmed off for educational methods now usurp the place of stunning, knock-down, intelligent facts." -- Florida County Superintendents Convention, 1898 "...our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent overeducation from happening." -- William Troy Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education 1889-1906 G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time. "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." -- G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey's former professor and close friend "Far too many people in America, both in and out of education, look upon the elementary school as a place to learn reading, writing and arithmetic." -- Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, National Education Association Yearbook, 1947 "When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write and spell ... that many of them either cannot or will not master these chores, then we will be on the way to improving the junior high curriculum." -- A.H. Lauchner, National Association of Secondary School Principles, March 1951 "I doubt whether reams of propaganda pamphlets, endless reiteration that all is well with our schools, or even pressure tactics will again fool the American people into believing that education can safely be left to the 'professional' educators." -- Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, "What Can We Do?", page 356 in John A. Dahl, et al, Students, School & Society, 1964 Schools as means to preserve class structure"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors. Editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, polititians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in a imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farms." -- John D. Rockefeller, "Occasional Letter No. 1", 1904. The text was published under Rockeller's name and was clearly as directed by him, but was most likely written by his assistant, Frederick Taylor Gates.
Schools as tools for social and political change"Whenever a teachers' convention meets and tries to find out how it can cure the ills of society, there is simply one answer; the school has but one way to cure the ills of society and that is by making men intelligent. To make men intelligent, the school has again but one way, and that is, first and last, to teach them to read, write and count. And if the school fails to do that, and tries beyond that to do something for which a school is not adapted, it not only fails in its own function, but it fails in all other attempted functions. Because no school as such can organize industry, or settle the matter of wage and income, can found homes or furnish parents, can establish justice or make a civilized world." -- W.E.B. DuBois, address to Georgia State Teachers Convention, 1935
"We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled
to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause."
"Shall we, then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any
chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take
into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that
we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they are grown up?"
"We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we
do not all mean the same thing."
"The philosophy of the school room in one generation
will be the philosophy of government in the next."
"Education ... has become in most countries at the present day a national concern.
The state receives, and often takes, the child from the arms
of the mother to hand it over to official agents;
the state undertakes to train the heart and to instruct the mind
of each generation. Uniformity prevails in the courses of public
instruction as in everything else; diversity as well as
freedom is disappearing day by day."
"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the
common people of their commonsense."
"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is
found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to
insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from
falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the
government from falling into error."
"Education for international understanding involves the use of education
as a force for conditioning the will of the people."
"We do not need any more preaching about right or wrong.
The old 'thou shall nots' simply are not relevant.
Values clarification is a method for teachers to change the values
of children without getting caught."
"What we're into is the total restructuring of society.
What is happening in America today ... is not simply a chance situation
in the usual winds of change... (it is) a total transformation of society ...
You can't get away from it. You can't go into rural areas, you can't go
into the churches, you can't go into government or into business and hide ...
Schools are no longer in the schooling business, but rather in human
resource development ... we have an opportunity to develop the kind of
society we want."
"A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be
exactly like one another; and the mold in which it casts them is that which
pleases the predominant power in the government."
"Public education does not serve the public. It creates the public.
And in creating the right kind of public ..."
"The first educational question will not be 'what knowledge is of the most worth?'
but 'what kind of humans beings do we want to produce?"
"If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education,
advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed
tuition subsidies."
"The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not
to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which
we call -- in enemy nations -- 'state indoctrination.'"
"That the National Education Association advocated federal aid has
surprised us at times but no longer. For control -- real control --
over the nation's children is being shifted rapidly to the
National Education Association. That organization has about
completed the job of cartelizing public school education
under its own cartel. It is doing so under an organization
known as the National Council for Accreditation of Teachers Education,
an agency whose governing council is tightly NEA-controlled.
The manner in which the NEA is usurping parental prerogatives
by determining the type of education offered is very simple:
control the education and hiring of teachers.
NEA has no apprehension regarding federal control of public schools
as a consequence of federal aid. It has control itself.
...
In the NEA scheme of things, it will be a simple matter to
extend control over whatever Washington agency handles the funds."
"We are the biggest potential political fighting force in this country,
and we are determined to control the direction of American education."
"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education.
They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child
is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think."
"Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in
erecting a grammar school. "
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers."
"... everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher."
"The role of the schoolmaster is to collect little plastic lumps of human dough
from private households and shape them on the social kneadingboard."
"Make me the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world."
"Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public
property . . . He must be taught to amass wealth, but it must be only to increase his
power of contributing to the wants and demands of the state ...
[Education] can be done effectually only by the interference and aid of the Legislature."
"The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be
well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion.
But in order to the effecting this the Government must have an authority
over the people of which we now do not so much as dream."
"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life."
"It is the universal custom and practice of monarchial and arbitrary
governments to train up their subjects as much in ignorance as they can ...
and to teach them to reverence and worship great men in office
and to take for truth whatever they say."
"The nation alone has the right to educate children."
"Just as the purpose of education in monarchies is to enoble men's hearts,
so its purpose in despotic states is to debase them. In despotic states
education must be servile. Even those holding power benefit from such an
education, for no one can be a tyrant without at the same time being a
slave...Absolute obedience presupposes ignorance in the person who obeys;
ignorance is presupposed as well in the person who commands. For he need
not deliberate, doubt, or reason; he has only to will...Thus education
is in one sense nonexistent. Everything previously known must be wiped
out, so that something may be taught. It is necessary first to make a
man into a bad subject in order to create a good slave."
"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but
if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state."
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers."
"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."
"A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state."
"The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along
without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense."
"Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will
never be uprooted."
"He who controls the language controls the masses."
"Well, I guess the Communists know that the old people living in America today
are not going to make the revolution. They are not the people who count.
They count on the young people, and those who control the youth
are the people who control the future of this country."
"Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property."
"First and foremost, we're running a public system at taxpayer's expense for
the public good and only secondarily for the good of parents and individuals."
"The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that
there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to
American membership in anything approaching a super-state
organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used
in further popular education."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem
those who think alike than those who think differently."
"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands
and at whom it is aimed."
"In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first
capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities,
churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
"At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each
schoolchild in Italy is studying."
"It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue,
gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity."
"Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils ... and to awaken in them a
sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation."
"I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin for my young men."
"By educating the young generation along the right lines,
the People's State will have to see to it that a generation
of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat
that will decide the destinies of the world."
"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is
found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to
insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
"There are many things the government can't do, many good purposes it must renounce.
It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people.
It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people."
"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of
our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their
industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of
meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to
excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their
minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their
lives."
Making a Difference
-- Frederick Douglass
"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something,
sometime in your life."
"If you're going through hell, keep going."
"The reward for conformity is everyone likes you but yourself."
"The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity.
Even a dead fish can go with the flow."
"To me consensus seems to be: the process of abandoning all beliefs,
principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one
believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the
very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get
agreement on the way ahead.
What great cause would have been fought and won under
the banner 'I stand for consensus'?"
"The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel."
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything"
"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." "Indecision is the key to flexibility." -- unknown origin
"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."
"It is quite an error to suppose the absence of convictions gives the mind
freedom and agility. A man who believes something is ready and witty, because he
has all his weapons about him."
"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."
"I'd like to keep an open mind, but not so much that my brain falls out."
"Too many people consider themselves open-minded when they're really just empty-headed."
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of
good conscience to remain silent."
"This country can't continue to be the land of
the free, unless it's also the home of the brave."
"Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and
social standing, never can bring about a reform."
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
"Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized.
"New ideas pass through three periods:
(1) It can't be done. (2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing. (3) I knew it was a good idea all along!"
"If one person does it then they think he's really sick ...
"It is amazing how many people think that the government's role is to give them what they want by overriding what other people want."
"Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience."
"Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted."
"When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
"Action is the antidote to despair."
"Don't wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel. Stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself."
"Every revolution was once a thought in one man's mind."
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful
of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a
new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those
who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all
those who would profit by the new..."
"Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to form an opinion."
"I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind."
"Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it."
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish."
"A stand can be made against the invasion of an army; no stand can be made against the invasion of an idea."
"Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come."
"I've often wondered about the shyness of some of us in the west about standing for these ideals
that have done so much to ease the plight of man and the hardships of our imperfect world."
"No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause."
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."
"That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies,
to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."
"To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle."
"Honest conviction is my courage; the Constitution is my guide."
"Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent and warn the opposed."
"Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders."
"We've got the right to choose and
"Goliath lost"
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