Best 16 quotes in «public education quotes» category

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.

Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state.

Science may appear to have no connection with political freedom…. Scientists are too busy with positive measures, such as productive research and the dissemination of the results of the search for truth, to take time out to refute every crackpot notion that gets into print…. If the democratic process were applied ideally, and if enough people were to accept the claims in the article as truth, then publicly supported schools and universities could be depopulated of competent faculties, whose places could be taken by quacks and political appointees. Granted that the chance of this is very small, nevertheless the imagined situation has a modern precedent. Something very similar did happen (on purely political grounds) in a European country during several years preceding the second world war. It has happened in other countries since the end of that war.

The dilemma I was faced with was one every parent faces sooner or later: you want to defend your child, of course; you stand up for your child, but you mustn't do it all too vehemently, and above all not too eloquently - you mustn't drive anyone into a corner. The educators, the teachers, will let you have your say, but afterwards they'll take revenge on your child. You may come up with better arguments - it's not too hard to come up with better arguments than the educators, the teachers - but in the end, your child to going to pay for it. Their frustration at being shown up is something they'll take out on the student.

the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will...

There is obviously something wrong with our educational system. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that there might even be something wrong with at least some of our schoolteachers. But heaven help anyone daring to express such heretical views.

Public education grants secular worldviews an exclusive monopoly in the classroom.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

The left has total control over the public education system, all the way up to the university level. It's something they own, and it's going to have to change.

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.

You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.

Before that, she was an elementary school teacher, until the state stripped the unions of collective bargaining rights in the Right to Learn Act, subcontracting public school education to for-profit corporations. She still missed teaching, but that was strictly an hourly-wage temp job now, for those lucky enough to get hired.

For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education. That's why, despite being soemthing of a liberatarian, he repeatedly proposed that the state pay for universal primary education as well as fund education at later stages. He was met with opposition from many quarters, mostly those wary of big government or highter taxes. Yet interestingly, one of this most ardent supporters was an old friend and political opponent, the conservative John Adams. "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it," Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people.

Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance.

He found, using fifty stones to keep track, that he could easily remember the names of all fifty states, and he knew the capitols of a lot of them. He knew his times tables all the way up to twelves, and he knew when they'd signed the Declaration of Independence and when John Glenn landed on the moon. But he was keenly aware that he didn't know how to tell if nuts were good to eat, or what berries will make you sick, or what mushrooms were poisonous, and he slowly began to wonder why not one person had ever taught him anything useful.