Teenagers treating other teenagers cruelly is part of growing up when compulsory schooling is part of growing up.
–David Henderson
Nothing provokes more angry letters from schoolteachers than saying that most college students who go into teaching are from the bottom half of their class. But author Martin Gross says the bottom third and Professor Diane Ravitch of NYU, the leading historian of American education, says that many are from the bottom quarter.
–Thomas Sowell
Should the government be permitted to remove children forcibly from their homes, with or without the parents’ consent, and subject the children to educational training and procedures of which the parents may or may not approve?
-Ayn Rand
Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.
–Sir Kenneth Robinson
When the American pedagogue became a professional, and began to acquire a huge armamentarium of technic, the trade of teaching declined, for only inferior men were willing to undergo a long training in obvious balderdash.
-H. L. Mencken
Ask any schoolchild why they don’t like school and they’ll tell you. “School is prison.”… Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.
–Peter Gray
Why are government officials and enthusiasts often hostile to leading corporations such as Microsoft, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and Martha Stewart? Why are they often hostile to other bases for independent private cultural power such as private builders, private schools, and talk radio? Part of the answer may be that they are jealous in guarding their role as medium and focal point in TPR [The People’s Romance]. Why are they hostile to placeless “suburban sprawl,” private communities, private shopping malls, the private automobile (especially big ones), gun ownership and toting, and home schooling? Because these practices are means of withdrawing from TPR and creating an autonomous circle of authority, power, and experience.
–Daniel B Klein
Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
-Ayn Rand
As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs. Many people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all.
–Peter Gray
A prospective teacher of biology, say, or mathematics, or physics, cannot outfit himself for his career by reading a few plays of Shakespeare, memorizing the rules of grammar laid down by idiots, and learning to pronounce either as if it were spelled eyether; he must apply himself to a vast mass of strange and difficult facts, and mastering them requires a kind of capacity that is not common. The stupider fellow turns to something that is easier and more obvious, which is to say, to the language that every “educated” man is presumed to know, and the books he is presumed to have read…
-H. L. Mencken
The truth is that the average schoolmaster, on all the lower levels, is and always must be…next door to an idiot, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation?
-H. L. Mencken
The pedagogues there incarcerated are all inferior men—men who really know very little about the things they pretend to teach, and are too stupid or too indolent to acquire more. Being taught by them is roughly like being dosed in illness by third-year medical students.
-H. L. Mencken
