Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quoteShare via Email Print this Page Daily Quotes Archives2025-04-07 Apr 7, 2025I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses.~ Davy CrockettGovernments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more.~ Francisco FerrerThat erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.~ H. L. Mencken Apr 4, 2025Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.~ Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.~ Benjamin FranklinChildren should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.~ John Adams Apr 3, 2025We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools; and by open, hearty behavior, show condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel.~ Adam WeishauptWe have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth … at a very early age. … This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.~ Adolf HitlerGive me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Apr 2, 2025The ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.~ Albert EinsteinWhat I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods?... The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." ... Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! — by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. ... We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when "I'm as good as you" has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to over-top their fellows? And anyway the teachers — or should I say, nurses? — will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.~ C. S. LewisWho besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.~ John Taylor Gatto Apr 1, 2025Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.~ Henry Brooks AdamsYou can never get enough of what you don't really need.~ Eric HofferI prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.~ Michel de Montaigne Previous week's quotes Next week's quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print