School Reform Quotes

“Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.”
― Frank Zappa

“Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
― Ken Robinson

“Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...”
― Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

“I think one of the problems [with raising intelligent children in modern society] is compulsory schooling...and that children are sitting there, and they are taught and told what to believe; they are passive from the very beginning – and one must be very, very aggressive intellectually to have a high IQ [...] the child is taught. Right from the beginning, it's a passive process. He or she sits there, and they simply try to believe everything they're told?”
― Marilyn Vos Savant

“It would be better to have no school at all than the schools we now have. Encouraged, instead of frightened, children could learn several languages before reaching age of four, at that age engaging in the invention of their own languages. Play'd be play instead of being, as now, release of repressed anger.”
― John Cage, M: Writings '67–'72

“The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [...] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do...you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics.”
― Anthony Esolen

“You can't lead your troops if your troops do not trust you.”
― Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

“Valda said that if you change your residence every six months you can legally free your children from compulsory education.”
― John Cage, M: Writings '67–'72

“During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.”
― Jonathan Bate

“Through most of human history, our ancestors had children shortly after puberty, just as the members of all nonhuman species do to this day. Whether we like the idea or not, our young ancestors must have been capable of providing for their offspring, defending their families from predators, cooperating with others, and in most other respects functioning fully as adults. If they couldn't function as adults, their young could not have survived, which would have meant the swift demise of the human race. The fact that we're still here suggests that most young people are probably far more capable than we think they are. Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of – and buried – the potential of our teens.”
― Robert Epstein

“[One way] researchers sometimes evaluate people's judgments is to compare those judgments with those of more mature or experienced individuals. This method has its limitations too, because mature or experienced individuals are sometimes so set in their ways that they can't properly evaluate new or unique conditions or adopt new approaches to solving problems.”
― Robert Epstein, Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence

“Oh my eye Betty Martin! Aren't I glad it isn't me that's going to school! It looks just like a prison.”
― Henry Handel Richardson