Now why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates? Abigail Adams, 1744-1818, wife of John Adams & mother of John Quincy Adams
The rod, which is the only instrument of government that tutors generally know, or ever think of, is the most unfit of any to be used in education. John Locke
Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut – at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus – and happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the last. This is called Finals, the very name of which implies that nothing of importance can happen after it. David Lodge, Changing Places
We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition. John McCain, presidential hustings
The purpose of education in America is not education; it is indoctrination. Dr Stan Monteith
The doctrine of opting out has proved pernicious in narrowing the local education resources available to local education authorities. Will Hutton, The State to Come
I think it’s important to understand that most of the educational programs that are implemented in the United States stem from the National Education Association. And the NEA was actually founded by John D Rockefeller. And John D Rockefeller I think voiced beliefs of this ruling elite that wants to try to homogenise our education system when he was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t want a nation of thinkers; I want a nation of workers.’ Jim Marrs, televised interview
Dumbing the individuals down to that point that he will be a good worker in the factory. ibid.
If you sat round a table and you said, Right, what we need to do is we need to find some way of getting young people to see the world the way we want them to see it so that by the time they become adults they are completely following the reality we want them to believe in. Someone might say, Well, they might not have it, like, but you know the ideal thing? What we do is we have a system where we take children away from their parents, at least five days a week, all day, from about the age of four or five and we have control of their minds until they are about 17 or 18. That would be ideal. Well of course that’s what happens. It’s called the education system. And it’s called indoctrination. David Icke, televised interview
I do not think the Empire will fall if a modest per cent of its females are taught to think for themselves. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie I ***** starring Geraldine McEwan & Amanda Kirby & Lynsey Baxter & Vivienne Ross et al, ITV 1978
To art and beauty and truth. ibid.
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
6Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. Nelson Mandela
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. Robert Frost
Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard. Robert Frost
Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. Martin Luther King
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, here idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive. Doris Lessing
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. G K Chesterton
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead. Aristotle
Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace. Confucius
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. Isaac Asimov
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself. Isaac Asimov, ‘I Asimov: A Memoir’
The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or ‘accessing’ what we now call ‘information’ – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first. Wendell Berry
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H G Wells
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher any more or you’re not a painter any more. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now. Anais Nin
The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one. Malcolm S Forbes
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. George Macaulay Trevelyan
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education. Walter Scott
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite. May Sarton