Education

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
        --Henry Brooks Adams

"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?"
        --Neal Boortz

"I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes."
        --Andrew Carnegie

"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
        --Diogenes

"Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends."
        --Benjamin Disraeli

"Only the educated are free."
        --Epictetus

"A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins."
        --Benjamin Franklin

"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom, nor justice can be permanently maintained."
        --James A. Garfield

"Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action."
        --Jhann W. Von Goethe

"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"If you expect a nation to be ignorant and free, you expect what never was and can never be."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artifically kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men."
        --C.S. Lewis

"But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled."
        --James Russell Lowell

"Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
        --Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787

"The end and aim of all education is the development of character."
        --Francis Parker

"It would seem that not only is religion lacking in the schools -- so is common sense. I wonder what a teacher is supposed to say if a kid asks about those four words on a dime -- 'In God We Trust.' Or maybe that's why they aren't being taught how to read these days."
        --Ronald Reagan

"Our coins bear the words 'In God We Trust'. We take the oath of office asking His help in keeping that oath. And we proclaim that we are a nation under God when we pledge allegiance to the flag. But we can't mention His name in a public school or even sing religious hymns that are nondenominational. Christmas can be celebrated in the school room with pine trees, tinsel and reindeers, but there must be no mention of the man whose birthday is being celebrated. One wonders how a teacher would answer if a student asked why it was called Christmas."
        --Ronald Reagan

"We developed at the local school district level probably the best public school system in the world. Or it was until the Federal government added Federal interference to Federal financial aid and eroded educational quality in the process."
        --Ronald Reagan

"If Americans wish to preserve a country they will recognize, then the first step is to recognize the enemy. Public education is the enemy. The entertainment industry is the enemy. The corporate culture is the enemy. The advertising industry is the enemy. And most of the politicians in both parties are the enemy. An enemy is defined as anybody, or any organization, which is attacking the traditional beliefs of Americans."
        --Charley Reese

"Some of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape."
        --Will Rogers

"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons."
        --John Ruskin

"True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world."
        --Felix E. Schelling, U.S. Educator

"It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It's a bureaucratic system where everybody's role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's not a surprise when a school system doesn't improve. It more resembles a Communist economy than our own market economy.''
        --Albert Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards."
        --Mark Twain