24 quotes
Mass education cannot work to produce a fair society because its daily practice is practice in rigged competition, suppression and intimidation.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Aristotle saw, a long time ago, that fully participating in a complex range of human affairs was the only way to become fully human.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the seven-lesson curriculum completely unscathed, not even the instructors.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently.
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
Schooling is organized by command and control from without; education is self-organized from within…
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
Schools teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it well: how to be a good Egyptian and remain in your place in the pyramid.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
The idea of schooling free men in anything would have revolted Athenians. Forced training was for slaves. Among free men, learning was self-discipline, not the gift of experts.
The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (2001)
What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is one right way to proceed with growing up.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people—and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.
People learn to read, write and do arithmetic just fine anyway. There are some studies that suggest literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at least for non-slaves on the Eastern seaboard, was close to total.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
Over the years of wrestling with the obstacles that stand between child and education, I have come to believe that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
There isn’t a right way to be educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints. We don't need state-certified teachers to make education happen — that probably guarantees it won't.
I Quit, I Think (1991)
I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.
This was once a land where every sane person knew how to build a shelter, grow food, and entertain one another. Now we have been rendered permanent children. It’s the architects of forced schooling who are responsible for that.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992)
I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2008)
Imprisonment schooling has no justification in science, common sense, or history. Get your children out of such schools if you want them to be educated. School means living up to the expectations of total strangers; education involves meeting your own expectations—GOAL SCHOOLS ARE UTTERLY INDIFFERENT TO.
The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling (2001)