Quotes & Sayings About Public Schooling

The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our
birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes
twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it
out of them. — Edward Abbey

Apparently almost anyone can do a better job of educating children than our so-called 'educators' in the public schools. Children who are home-schooled by their parents also score higher on tests than children educated in the public schools ... Successful education shows what is possible, whether in charter schools, private schools, military schools or home-schooling. The challenge is to provide more escape hatches from failing public schools, not only to help those students who escape, but also to force these institutions to get their act together before losing more students and jobs. — Thomas Sowell

The phenomenon of home schooling is a wonderful example of the American can-do attitude. Growing numbers of parents have become disenchanted with government-run public schools. Many parents have simply taken matters into their own hands, literally. — Steve Forbes

Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic. — Neil Postman

Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. — Hugh Jackman

Had I ever spent the day in our neighborhood public high school as an invisible woman while my children were still enrolled there, I no doubt would have insisted on home schooling. — Jeanne Ray

For citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands. — Pico Iyer

God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission. — Leo Tolstoy

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum. — Azar Nafisi

I have found that traditional school settings are hostile to children who live under constant stress and duress. I resent the idea that, just because it is "free," public education is the first choice. Public education is one choice among many, but it is not the norm against which other schooling options are to be graded. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

If the "world" believed something, then you had to believe its opposite to be righteous. It made people rage against everything from a global economy to public schooling and immunizations, but mostly I thought it was just an excuse not to have to do the work that seeing shades of grey requires. — Mette Ivie Harrison

Restoring prayer ... will scarcely at this date solve the grievous public school problem. Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3 R's or in keeping simple order within the schools. Any plan to begin dismantling the public school monstrosity is met with effective opposition by the teachers' and educators' unions. Truly radical change is needed to shift education from public to unregulated private schooling, religious and secular, as well as home schooling by parents. — Murray Rothbard

In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years. — Jonathan Kozol

We have to go and show these people what classical music is. We say sometimes that classical music has a small audience, but it's because people don't have the chance to be closer to it. — Gustavo Dudamel

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith. — John Taylor Gatto

Writing is a process of creating yourself again and again for an ever-searching mind. — Debasish Mridha

When I was really young, I can remember being into fashion, but I was really into horses and sports. — Kendall Jenner

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

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic
it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor. — John Taylor Gatto

This was her destiny, and it was a fit and proper one. She was not unwilling, but she knew this was a fateful moment, and she had a sense of doors closing behind her and the path of her life being fixed irrevocably. — Ken Follett

There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions — Ludwig Von Mises

The question that has perhaps divided students of vouchers more than any other is their likely effect on the social and economic class structure. Some have argued that the great value of the public school has been as a melting pot, in which rich and poor, native- and foreign-born, black and white have learned to live together. That image was and is largely true for small communities, but almost entirely false for large cities. There, the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location. It is no accident that most of the country's outstanding public schools are in high-income enclaves. — Milton Friedman

Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful. — Christopher Isherwood

The sociological imagination refers to the ability of some to learn - often with good luck or coaching or perhaps with formal schooling - to realize that, just as often, one's personal troubles are in fact public issues. — Charles Lemert

Sometimes people forget the bridge that connected them to success. — Nikita Dudani

The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling. — Neil Postman

Like timidity, bravery is also contagious. — Munshi Premchand

I saw the figure of 178 Billion wasted/stolen from the people of a country by its corrupt and inept government. Such a figure could truly transform the entire country; education, health, roads, schooling, entrepreneurial environment ... of millions of people, rather than be secreted away as a few more 0000's in global bank accounts for the greeders.
We need to Rethink Public Service, Values, Ethics and Leadership. — Tony Dovale

If you have to fight an enemy at a critical point in time, and you have an ally who happens to be a dictator, you don't say: Let's stop fighting right now, because you're not a democrat. That would be ridiculous. — Natan Sharansky

The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a dull, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary world civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education. We cannot begin a reform of education unless we first understand that neither individual learning nor social equality can be enhanced by the ritual of schooling. We cannot go beyond the consumer society unless we first understand that obligatory public schools inevitably reproduce such a society, no matter what is taught in them. — Ivan Illich

The path to a better future goes directly through our public schools. I have nothing against private schools, parochial schools and home schooling, and I think that parents with the means and inclination should choose whatever they believe is best for their children. But those choices cannot compete, and cannot come at the expense of what has been
and what must always be
the great equalizer in our society, a free and equal public education. — Howard Dean

Connection was the cement of the governing class. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The public is indoctrinated to believe that skills are valuable and reliable only if they are the result of formal schooling. — Ivan Illich

For Baudelaire, man's poetic fate is to be the mirror of immensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vast being. — Gaston Bachelard

Everyone knows the principles of Beautiful life but,
only few of them have opportunities to follow them. — Kartik Mehta

I thought you were just typical teenagers."

No one has ever called me typical. I can't say I like it. — Sarah Nicolas

There is a man whose qualities can be savored by people who are getting old ... The painter qualities are carried to the highest point in his work: what he does is done - through and through; when he paints eyes, they are lit with the fire of life. — Eugene Delacroix