Fabulous quotes on "schooling"

I collect these, some of them, like Einstein's are well known, others in this list are relatively new to me. I'm particularly interested in what educators have to say - like Charlotte Mason who championed a curriculum that was both classical in nature and full of time out of doors exploring nature, everything else was in short bursts of time so children had time to run about engaged in LIVING during the day. She really understood the need for a balanced head, heart, and hands lifestyle.


"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." Albert Einstein

"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."George Bernard Shaw

"What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook."Henry David Thoreau

"The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you." John Updike (who has taught in an exclusive private school for years btw - even teachers hate the institution of the "school" !)

"I do not believe much in education. Each man ought to be his own model, however frightful that may be." Albert Einstein

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."Ivan Illich

"There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school" George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize winner)

"Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities." Seymour Papert

"Our aim in education is to give a full life. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or all feeling or all thinking - the strain would be too great - but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest."Charlotte Mason

"In the end, the secret to learning is so simple: Think only about whatever you love. Follow it, do it, dream about it...and it will hit you: learning was there all the time, happening by itself." Grace Llewellyn

"the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions."- Noam Chomsky

What I will never understand is how people who believe these same sentiments would still force their children to attend school when they had the ability and resources to provide alternatives. Surviving the system doesn't enrich anyone's life, it just feeds bitterness and resentment. Of course maybe that is their goal, who knows?