Benjamin Franklin
"He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on"
Excerpts from Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto:
1. "Why are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn't any sane community look on such as education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people , demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as 'low class' material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! I don't believe that anyone who thinks about that feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. I can't help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids that we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn. I have enough faith in American imagination and resourcefulness to believe that at that point we'd come up with a better way - in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.
One thing I do know, though: most of us who've had a taste of loving families, even a little taste, want our kids to part of one. One other thing I know is that eventually you have to come to be part of a place - part of its hills and streets and waters and peoples - or you will live a very, very sorry life as an exile forever. Discovering meaning for yourself as well as discovering satisfying purpose for yourself, is a big part of what education is.
How this can be done by locking children away from the world is beyond me."
2. "Schools are already a major cause of weak families and weak communities. They separate parents and children from vital interaction with each other and from true curiosity about each other's lives. Schools stifle family originality by appropriating the critical time needed for any sound idea of family to develop - then they blame the family for its failure to be a family. It's like malicious person lifting a photograph from the developing chemicals too early, and then pronouncing the photographer is incompetent."
3. "Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever they are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die."
4. "Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression, and intimidation. The schools we've allowed to develop can't work to teach nonmaterial values, the values which give meaning to everyone's lives, rich or poor, because the structure of schooling is held together by a Byzantine tapestry of reward and threat, carrots and sticks. Official favor, grades, or other trinkets of subordination have no connection with education; they are the paraphernalia of servitude, not of freedom.
Mass schooling damages children. We don't need any more of it. And under the guise that it is the same thing as education, it has been picking our pockets just as Socrates predicted it would thousands of years ago. One of the surest ways to recognize real education is by the fact that it doesn't cost much, doesn't' depend on expensive toys or gadgets. The experiences that produce it and the self-awareness that propels it are nearly free. "
5. "Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education. By preempting fifty percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with other young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables - and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways - network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly mechanism. No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents.
A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety: good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such place promote the highest quality of life possible - lives of engagement and participation. This happens in unexpected ways, but it never happens when you've spent more than a decade listening to other people talk and trying to do what they tell you to do, trying to please them after the fashion of schools. It makes a real lifelong difference whether you avoid that training or it traps you."
6. "Two institutions at present control our children's live: television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, nonstop abstraction. In centuries past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.Albert Einstein
But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:Out of the 168 hours in each week my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.According to recent reports, children watch 55 hours of television a week. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about eight hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and spend an average of seven hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time they are under constant surveillance. They have no private time or private space and are disciplined if the try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves them 12 hours a week of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course my kids eat, too, and takes some time - not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining - but if we allot three hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of nine hours per week.It's not enough, is it?"
"It is... nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."Beatrix Potter
"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality"
Bernard Shaw
"There is, on the whole, 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."
H.L. Mencken
"School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"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. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing."
Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review
"Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be "taught" if they are to learn. . . . Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I'm angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own."
Winston Churchill
"I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was a unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony."
"How I hated this school, and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude."
Galileo
"You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself."
Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are
"I hate, loathe and despise schools....School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way."
Claude Monet
"I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water."
Isaac Asimov
"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
John Holt
“We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do for even an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn’t interest us, can keep our minds from wandering? Hardly any.”
“It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.”
“It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."
Mark Twain
"I have never let my school interfere with my education"
Lisa Russell
"The idea of learning acceptable social skills in a school is as absurd to me as learning nutrition from a grocery store."Agatha Christie
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem forlornly unable to produce their own ideas"Mahatma Gandhi
“There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.”Ezra Pound
“Real education must ultimately be limited to [people] who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding."Plato
"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the child's natural bent.”Dr. Raymond Moore
"Does anyone who knows children believe that the yellow school bus takes children down the road to a constructive, positive sense of society? Or returns them in the afternoon or evening more loving creatures than when they left in the morning?"Isabel Paterson
"Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?"John Taylor Gatto:
"Libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn’t tell me what to read, doesn’t tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn’t grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps me when I want help, not when she decides I need it. If I feel like reading all day long, that’s okay with the librarian, who doesn’t compel me to stop at intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home. It doesn’t send letters to my family, nor does it issue orders on how I should use my reading time at home.
The library doesn’t play favorites; it’s a democratic place as seems proper in a democracy. If the books I want are available, I get them, even if that decision deprives someone more gifted and talented than I am. The library never humiliates me by posting ranked lists of good readers. It presumes good reading is its own reward and doesn’t need to be held up as an object lesson to bad readers. One of the strangest differences between a library and a school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library.
The library never makes predictions about my future based on my past reading habits. It tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes free men and women are often very eccentric. Finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. I know the Moby Dick I find in the library won’t have questions at the end of the chapter or be scientifically bowdlerized. Library books are not written by collective pens. At least not yet."Grace Llewellyn from 'The Teenage Liberation Handbook':
"In general schools screen us from reality -no matter how we define reality. Is reality in books, in the intellect? School censors more than it reveals. Does reality lurk in raw adventure? In religion? In culture? In friendship and community? In work? School just gets in the way."Robert Rodale:
"I've been out of school for over thirty years, yet no matter how I manage to arrange my life, I still keep learning. In fact, I seem to learn faster the further in time I get from mys school experience.Henry David Thoreau
When you are in school, you are asked the questions, and are expected to be able to find the answers. Presumably, when you are sufficiently filled up with correct answers, you are educated, and then released.
I now believe, though, that real learning occurs when you become able to ask important questions. Then you are on the doorstep of wisdom, because by asking important questions you project your mind into the exploration of new territory. In my experience, very few peopel have learned how important is the asking of good questions, and even fewer have made a habit of asking them. Even in my own case, I had to wait until I'd almost totally forgotten the experience of schooling to be able to switch my mind into the asking as well as the answering mode."
"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook"Sign up for:
Daily Unschooling Quotes
