Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [181-200] of 416 Education quotesEducation QuotesEducation Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning.~ John Holt No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.~ John Holt No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.~ John Holt The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.~ John Holt It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.~ John Holt Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.~ John Holt Education -- compulsory schooling, compulsory learning -- is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.~ John Holt People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help.~ John Holt What children need is not new and better curriculum but access to more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them.~ John Holt Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.~ Horace Contrary to everything our rulers tell us, and everything that our schoolteachers are teaching the children of this nation, the biggest threat to the lives and well-being of the American people lies not with some foreign government. The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. And while gun ownership stands as a barrier to potential, Nazi-like behavior, the long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and Energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior. It entails the repeal of all laws that permit such conduct. And it means the privatization of most of the bureaucrats who work for the U.S. government.~ Jacob G. Hornberger We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that Wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman.~ Jacob G. Hornberger Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.~ Jack Hugh Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.~ Jack Hugh It's OK to lie. It's OK to steal. It's OK to have premarital sex. It's OK to cheat or to kill if these things are part of your value system, and you clarified these values for yourself. The important thing is not what values you choose, but that you have chosen them for yourself and without coercion of parents, spouse, priest, friends, ministers or social pressure of any kind.~ Humanist Curriculum Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.~ Robert M. Hutchins Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.~ Robert M. Hutchins The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.~ Robert M. Hutchins A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.~ Aldous Huxley Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.~ Aldous Huxley Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print