Democracy In Education Quotes & Sayings

While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. — John Dewey

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race. — John F. Kennedy

The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. — Lewis Henry Morgan

I am not against identity politics or single based issues; at the same time, we need to find ways to connect these singular modes of politics to broader political narratives about democracy so we can recognize their strengths and limitations in building broad-based social movements. In short, we need to find new ways to connect education to the struggle for democracy that is under assault in ways that were unimaginable forty years ago. — Henry Giroux

The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy. — Edward L. Bernays

I stand on the shoulders of giants that have gone before me, in terms of affording people like myself, women, the access to democracy, the vote, medical treatment, education, everything that I've been given. It's all been earned. Therefore I feel it's incumbent on me personally to just contribute something, to add to a collective voice that needs to be here right now, to build it up to a tipping point, to make the world aware that women's rights still have to be addressed and that the word 'feminism' has been devalued and needs to be reclaimed. — Annie Lennox

Education in democracy must be carried on within the Party so that members can understand the meaning of democratic life, the meaning of the relationship between democracy and centralism, and the way in which democratic centralism should be put into practice. Only in this way can we really extend democracy within the Party and at the same time avoid ultra-democracy and the laissez-faire that destroys discipline. — Mao Zedong

[P]olitical freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged 'freely' selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we need democratization of social and economic life. In short, we have to admit that what we first took as the failure fully to realize the noble principle of democratic freedom is a failure inherent to this principle itself. Learning how the distortion of a notion, its incomplete realization, is grounded in the distortion immanent to this notion is a big step in political education. — Slavoj Zizek

No less characteristic in a democracy is social justice. This demands a solution to the frightening indexes of infant mortality, of malnutrition, lack of education illiteracy, wages not sufficient to sustain life — Rigoberta Menchu

In our democracy every young person should have an equal opportunity to obtain a higher education, regardless of his station in life or financial means. — John F. Kennedy

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
[Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, February 26, 1962] — John F. Kennedy

Everything that we believe in and count on is really in question right now. Our safety net, public education, housing, health care, so many things that are fundamental to a healthy democracy, are under attack. So I think, in general we've got a lot of work to do. — Ai-jen Poo

Democracy triumphed in the cold war because it was a battle of values - between one system that gave preeminence to the state and another that gave preeminence to the individual and freedom. Not long ago, I was told about an incident that illustrated this difference: An American scholar, on his way to the airport before a flight to the Soviet Union, got into a conversation with his cab driver, a young man who said that he was still getting his education. The scholar asked, "When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be, what do you want to do?" The young man answered, "I haven't decided yet." After the scholar arrived at the airport in Moscow, his cab driver was also a young man who happened to mention he was still getting his education, and the scholar, who spoke Russian, asked, "When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be, what do you want to do?" The young man answered: "They haven't told me yet. — Ronald Reagan

A good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it — Mike Rose

The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school. — Grace Abbott

Schools need not preach political doctrine to defend democracy. If they shape men capable of critical thought and trained in social attitudes, that is all that is necessary. — Albert Einstein

In effective, sustained citizen action, people learn the skills of public life with which to act effectively. "Commons," or the common wealth-the public goods that are objects of sustainable public action-become not only occasions for collaboration by invaluable sources of citizen education in their own right because they are the occasions for learning such skills. — Harry Boyte

Internal democracy in schools is as important in order to ensure the true democratization of education. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

DEMOCRACY is a form of leading state in which the right and power" must be in the hands of the people and absolutely must have a system to ensure the right and power" of the people permanently. — Khem Veasna

I have an unshaken conviction that democracy can never be undermined if we maintain our library resources and a national intelligence capable of utilizing them.
[Letter to Herbert Putnam; in: Waters, Edward N.: Herbert Putnam: the tallest little man in the world; Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 33:2 (April 1976), p. 171] — Franklin D. Roosevelt

This was the march of civilization. First there is barbarism, no schools at all, all learning done at home, chaotically if at all. Then there is civil society, democracy, the right to free schooling for every child. Close on the heels of the right to free education is the right to pull these children out of the free schools and put them in private-schools - we have a right to pay for what is provided for free! And this is followed, inevitably and petulantly, by the right to pull them from school altogether, to do it yourself at home, everything coming full circle. — Dave Eggers

Public education is a great instrument of social change. Through it, if we so desire, we can make our country more nearly a democracy without classes. To do so will require the efforts of us all-teachers, administrators, taxpayers and statesmen. Education is a social process, perhaps the most important process in determining the future of our country; it should command a far larger portion of our national income than it does today. — James Bryant Conant

The multitudinous substitutes for indigenous culture cannot grow. Having no roots, they can only age and decay. Studious, sincere youth retires, defeated. American youth, capable of becoming serious competent artists, under such pressure as this on every side, confused, try not to give up
or "fall in line." This is the nature of about all that can be called American education in the arts and architecture at this time. As for religion true to the teaching of the great redeemer who said "The Kingdom of God is within you"
that religion is yet to come: the concept true not only for the new reality of building but for the faith we call democracy. — Frank Lloyd Wright

As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak. — Naguib Mahfouz

A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him.
This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error.
Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. — Alexis De Tocqueville

That generation really has to fight for a new political language, social movements, and alliances with students from other countries. They have to convince labor, parents, and the general public that the fight over higher education is a fight that benefits everyone in a sustainable democracy and not just faculty and students. — Henry Giroux

Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on. — Noam Chomsky

The lesson for progressive education is that it requires in an urgent degree, a degree more pressing than was incumbent upon former innovators, a philosophy of education based upon a philosophy of experience.
I remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies. — John Dewey

Without free speech one cannot claim other liberties, or defend them when they are attacked. Without free speech one cannot have a democratic process, which requires the statement and testing of policy proposals and party platforms. Without free speech one cannot have a due process at law, in which one can defend oneself, accuse, collect and examine evidence, make a case or refute one. Without free speech there cannot be genuine education and research, enquiry, debate, exchange of information, challenges to falsehood, questioning of governments, proposal and examination of opinion. Without free speech there cannot be a free press, which...is necessary...as one of the two essential estates of a free society (the other being an independent judiciary). — A.C. Grayling

Well, it all began with Democracy. Before we had the vote all the power was in the hands of rich people. If you had money you could get health care, education, look after yourself when you were old, and what democracy did was to give the poor the vote and it moved power from the marketplace to the polling station, from the wallet ... to the ballot. — Tony Benn

A democratic society must seek to give every young person, whether native-born or newcomer, the knowledge and skills to succeed as an adult. In a political system that relies on the participation of informed citizens, everyone should, at a minimum, learn to speak, read and write a common language. Those who would sustain our democratic life must understand its history. Tailoring children's education to the color of their skin, their national origins, or their presumed ethnicity is in some fundamental sense contrary to our nation's founding ideals of democracy, equality and opportunity. — Diane Ravitch

Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, 'What is education for?' If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that's really not your business, and it shouldn't be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you. — John Taylor Gatto

Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. — Steven Pinker

The more people participate in the process of their own education, and the more people participate in defining what kind of production to produce, and for what and why, the more people participate in the development of their selves. The more people become themselves, the better the democracy. — Paulo Freire

The root of democracy is in mass education. This foundation becomes stronger, when the citizens of tomorrow, our children are also educated about the electoral process. — Narendra Modi

For it was only after I could become President of this country that I could really see in all its hopeful and troubling implications just how much the hopes of our citizens and the security of our Nation and the real strength of our democracy depended upon the learning and the understanding of our people. — Lyndon B. Johnson

The World Bank, anxious that the last vestiges of Zimbabwe's former inclination toward socialism be abandoned, successfully urged the imposition of a token tuition charge for all grade levels. Equivalent to one U. S. dollar per year per child, this fee constitutes a burden to the poorest families, who have responded by sending only boys to classes. Too many of the girls ... have resorted to prostitution in order to eat. — Michael Dorris

The forefathers of the United States were children of religious bigotry and persecution, and, as a result, fled Britain to create a new approach to life and government. They valued intellect and education. In fact, they outlined the principles of the United States' democracy to establish intellectual freedom from the Church. — Mike Medavoy

If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. — Carl Sagan

Crucial element of Greek education. In the city-state of Sparta, the most extreme example of this focus, young boys considered weak at birth were abandoned to die. The rest were sent to grueling boot camps, where they were toughened into Spartan soldiers from an early age. Around the fifth century BC, some Greek city-states, most notably Athens, began to experiment with a new form of government. "Our constitution is called a democracy," the Athenian statesman Pericles noted in his funeral oration, "because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the — Fareed Zakaria

Hamilton wanted to lead the electorate and provide expert opinion instead of consulting popular opinion. He took tough, uncompromising stands and gloried in abstruse ideas in a political culture that pined for greater simplicity. Alexander Hamilton triumphed as a doer and thinker, not as a leader of the average voter. He was simply too unashamedly brainy to appeal to the masses. Fisher Ames observed of Hamilton that the common people don't want leaders 'whom they see elevated by nature and education so far above their heads. — Ron Chernow

We need a revolution in development thinking and practice. Foreign aid, debt relief, family planning, democracy, education, and free markets have not succeeded. — William Easterly

The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government. — Carl L. Becker

I'd rather have the influence than the power, and the influence to me is to build institutions of independence and democracy, to regain for Egypt prestige in education and science and technology. — Ahmed Zewail

The ultimate victory of tomorrow is democracy, and through democracy with education, for no people in all the world can be kept eternally ignorant or eternally enslaved. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy. — Fareed Zakaria

Meaningful student involvement is the process of engaging students as partners in every facet of school change for the purpose strengthening their commitment to education, community & democracy. — Adam Fletcher

Parent power is not a sign of democracy, it is a sign of barbarism. We are to regard education as a service industry, like a laundry, parents are the customers, teachers the washers, children the dirty linen. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And what in the name of boiling hell do parents know about education? How many educated people are there in the world? I could name seventeen or eighteen. — Stephen Fry

..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games.

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas. — James K. Galbraith

She was an autocrat, didn't really believe in democracy. The benefit of her approach was that, if you work with twenty people and ask everybody's opinion, you would never achieve what she did. — Theresa Sjoquist

We are supposed to believe [capitalist ideology] was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. If there was such a champion, might it not have been freedom itself, as realized in the institutional forms of democracy? This is not how the story has been told. We are t believe it was an economic system, capitalism, that arrayed its forces against its opposite, communism, and rescued all we hold dear. Yet in the new era ... [capitalism] has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment, and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens. — Marilynne Robinson

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. — H.L. Mencken

With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a republic based roughly on
the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common
party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism. — Gore Vidal

In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols. — Naomi Klein

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.
This is surely the death of all thought.
This quote is taken from "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7. — Mark Rothko

The Impression that Pakistan being an Islamic State is thereby a Theocratic State is being sedulously fostered in certain quarters with the sole object of discrediting her in the eyes of the world. To anyone conversant with the basic principles of Islam, it should be obvious that in the fields of civics, Islam has always stood on complete social democracy and social justice, as the history of the early Caliphs will show, and has not sanctioned government by a sacerdotal class deriving its authority from God. The ruler and the ruled alike are #equal before Islamic Law, and the ruler, far from being a vicegerent of God on earth, is but a representative of people who have chosen him to serve them ... Islam has not recognized any distinction between man and man based on sex, race or worldly possessions ...
Fazul Rahman, First Education Minister of Pakistan, All Pakistan Educational Conference, Karachi, Nov 1947 — Fazul Rahman

If any lesson may be learned from the academic breakthroughs achieved by Pineapple and Jeremy, it is not that we should celebrate exceptionality of opportunity but that the public schools themselves in neighborhoods of widespread destitution ought to have the rich resources, small classes, and well-prepared and well-rewarded teachers that would enable us to give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the poor only on the basis of a careful selectivity or by catching the attention of empathetic people like the pastor of a church or another grown-up whom they meet by chance. Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate children of a genuine democracy. — Jonathan Kozol

They know that as long as they keep us undereducated, or with an inferior education, it's impossible for us to compete with them for job openings. And as long as we can't compete with them and get a decent job, we're trapped. We are low-wage earners. We have to live in a run-down neighborhood, which means our children go to inferior schools. They get inferior education. And when they grow up, they fall right into the same cycle again. This is the American way. This is the American democracy that she tries to sell to the whole world as being that which will solve the problems of other people too. — Malcolm X

At the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons, in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom - not democracy, and not ecological stewardship - is the defining metaphor of the WTO and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total commodification. — Maude Barlow

We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory. — Henry A. Giroux

The rapidly evolving global economy demands a dynamic and creative workforce. The arts and its related businesses are responsible for billions of dollars in cultural exports for this country. It is imperative that we continue to support the arts and arts education both on the national and local levels. The strength of every democracy is measured by its commitment to the arts. — Charles Segars

Simple class-based bigotry that infected truth in the liberal media. And he knew the difference between those same propaganda dicks who distinguished between blue collar and white collar workers with the old Soviet-catchphrase, "Working Class," as if human beings were broken down into different species according to their education or wealth or jobs. He hated that jarringly divisive phrase as the kind of Cold War propaganda that launched "class struggle" and "people's democracy" as American political concerns, among the evil Communist movement's greatest coups. It was something he only heard from the so-called "elites" but never back home in the old neighborhood. "Old Harbor Village housing projects. — Michael J. Stedman

A constitutional democracy is in serious trouble if its citizenry does not have a certain degree of education and civic virtue. — Phillip E. Johnson

The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact. The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. — John Dewey

I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to stifle mental freedom, which is the very basis of a democracy's life and growth. — Anais Nin

Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity — Thomas Jefferson

We must recognize the fundamental rights of man. There can be no true national life in our democracy unless we give unqualified recognition to freedom of religious worship and freedom of education. — Franklin D. Roosevelt