It's instructive to read what some people have to say about their own school years!. Oh, the awful tasks they were subjected to! Woe for the anguish they faced in having to do repeated practice, or drills, or learning of -- gasp -- facts! Weep for what was lost, what they might have become, if not for those awful schools!
Now, there are those who say, "But these early years should be about the basics, to build the foundation for real critical thinking, curiosity and imagination in later years of school and on into life." Ha! If that were true, then surely the miserable schools described here would have turned out graduates of achievement and promise, instead of the worthless, wretched miscreants that we quote here!
"My own experience in public school was quite frustrating. I was often bored. ... I wondered, 'Why can't school be interesting all of the time?'"This terrible, boring education destroyed the imagination, ability and ambition of ...
George Lucas
filmmaker
"I wish I could tell you about inspirational teachers in science from my elementary or junior high or high school days. But as I think back on it, there were none. There was rote memorization ... there was an answer we were supposed to get. We were marked off if we didn't get it. ... Long division was taught as a set of rules from a cookbook. ... It was our job merely to remember what had been commanded."Imagine the horror of using such a criminal drill-and-kill to teach the basics of science! The product of this crushing nightmare was ...
Carl Sagan
scientist and author
"Education! ... We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing."How could anyone ever master the language or go on to contemplate life after a deadening education like that? This terrible education produced ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"School was a pretty deadly place when I attended. We were forced to learn a given number of pages of text and recite them orally the next day. ... Discipline was then the key to education..."Omigosh -- can you see how this rote learning and stifling environment would positively destroy the imagination, critical thinking and verbal abilities of a young man growing up? Too bad that this person suffered through that, because imagine what might have been achieved by...
John Dewey
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.""It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."
Yup, formal education killed the curiosity of ...
Albert Einstein
physicist
"Reducing this great drama to the rote of names, dates and places ought to be treated as a punishable crime."Good heavens, imagine starting to learn history with just a foundation of facts? That would devastate a child's potential down the road to develop insight and wisdom, as it did for that of ...
Walter Cronkite
TV anchor
