“I have never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education.”
---Mark Twain
“In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things."
-- Plato
"Education is what remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
"I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there."
-- Petronius
"I remember that I was never able to get along at school."
"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school."
"Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health, so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."
“You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.”
"My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."
“I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.”
“We busted out of class. Had to get away from those fools. We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.”
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
---Paul Simon
"I am 39 years old, and I still wake up every morning really excited I don't have to go to school."
"Our education system is impoverishing our spirits as much as fast food is depleting our bodies."
“Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner."
-- John Lubbock
“I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it's just depressing to me. The poor little kids.”
"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
-- John Dewey
"They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing."
"In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson."
"Schools: vast factories for the manufacture of robots."
"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
"Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of [school]."
-- Victor Hugo
"Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace."
"[School] rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought."
"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts."
-- Frank Zappa
"Education is a subversive activity -- that is the reason so little of it is going on."
-- J.P. Beckley
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
-- Oscar Wilde
"[School] makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines."
-- Erich Fromm
"For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one."
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
"In school, they said Practice Makes Perfect, and then they said Nobody's Perfect, so I stopped practicing."
"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."
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by [school]"
"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system."
"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence."
-- H.L. Mencken
"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."
-- Ivan Illich
"Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school."
-- Ivan Illich
“Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind concieves of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessable only to those who carry the proper tags.”
"Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore."
"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality."
"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school."
"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school"
"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."
"Those in society who are in charge of schools must never forget that the parents have been appointed by God himself as the first and principal educators of their children and that their right is completely inalienable."
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."
"Whatever the explanation, it's perfectly obvious that our educational system has nothing to do with education: it's a babysitting service designed to replicate the worst qualities of the parents."
“Something stopped me in school a little bit. Anything that I'm not interested in, I can't even feign interest.”
"It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens. Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do."
"Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
"Education is the period in which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know."
"The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on - because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."
-- Noam Chomsky
“Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.”
“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear”
“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.”
“None of the world's problems will have a solution until the world's individuals become thoroughly self-educated.”
You have been brainwashed by school and by the system into believing that your job is to do your job and follow instructions."
-- Seth Godin
"The authority of those who teach is very often a hindrance to those who wish to learn."
-- Cicero
“I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.”
“Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.”
“I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.”
School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn't want to learn.”
"My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me."
“...I know it's childish and stupid, but, then again, so is high school.”
“I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.”
A lot of people think that when they hear prominent figures sounding off on the damage modern school does, that they are, at best, kidding or at worst, exaggerating for effect. But when you look at how many of our greatest minds and talents have been profoundly critical of the very existence of this seemingly most revered of institutions it begins to paint a clear picture. ...They’re not kidding in the least.
