“When we want better families, better neighbors, better friends, and better schools we shall turn our backs on national and global systems, on expert experts and specialist specialties and begin to make our own schools one by one, far from the reach of systems.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Poverty can’t make you miserable; only a bad character and a weak spirit can do that.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on than with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“When fundamental rights depend on someone's whim, you really have no rights, only privileges that may be withdrawn at any minute.”
Source: A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
“School is a perfect place to turn science into religion, but it's the wrong place to learn science, for sure.”
Source: A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
“School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Schools create the problems they seem to exist to solve.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Stanley was passed from store to store doing free labor in exchange for an opportunity to learn the business. "This way I decide which business I like well enough to set up for myself," he told me. "You tell me what books to read and I’ll read them, but I don’t have time to waste in school unless I want to end up like the rest of these people, working for somebody else." After I heard that I couldn’t in good conscience keep him locked up. Could you? If you say yes, tell me why.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“People individually do best for everyone when they do best for themselves, when they aren’t commanded too much or protected against the consequences of their own folly.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“People can change, but systems cannot without losing their structural integrity.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Wage-slaves, free in name only, are much cheaper to exploit, and work harder than slaves.”
Source: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
“The earth might move, but human nature only accepts the move when it suits human purposes.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Waiting your turn is often the worst way to get what you want.”
“The natural solution to learning to live together in a community is first to learn to live apart as individuals and as families. Only when you feel good about yourself can you feel good about others.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“By redirecting the focus of our lives from families and communities to institutions and networks, we, in effect, anoint a machine our king.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“Networks like schools are not communities, just as school training is not education.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“A combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families has swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Unceasing competition for official favor in the dramatic fish bowl of a classroom delivers cowardly children, little people sunk in chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose for being alive.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Trapped children, like trapped rats, need close management.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Was it possible I did like kids, just not the script written for them?”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“I can’t believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education, Volume I: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Is it possible that those who sit atop the social bell curve represent the worst of evolution’s products, not its best? Have the fools among us who just don’t get it risen up and taken command?”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Massified populations cannot exercise self-control very well since they depend on constant oversight to behave as required. When external controls are removed, anything becomes possible.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“The publicists of mass-production economics have successfully altered public taste to believe it doesn’t make sense to repair something old when for the same price you can have something new.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“The most important things worth knowing are innate in you already.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, 'What is education for?' If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that's really not your business, and it shouldn't be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“The search for a material paradise is a flight away from humanity into the sterile nonlife of mechanisms where everything is perfect until it becomes junk.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Em nossa sociedade secular, a escola se tornou o substituto da Igreja e, assim como na Igreja, é necessário que seus ensinamentos sejam aceitos com base na fé.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“Pensem nos fenômenos que estão nos destruindo como nação: drogas, competição desmiolada, sexo recreativo, a pornografia da violência, jogatina e álcool — e a pior das pornografias: vidas dedicadas a comprar coisas, acumulação como uma filosofia. Todos esses são vícios de personalidades dependentes, e é isso que o nosso tipo de escola tem de inevitavelmente produzir.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“Without clear awareness of the short arc of life, nothing means very much.”
Source: Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
“Real books, unlike schoolbooks, can’t be standardized. They are eccentric; no book fits everyone.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“The whole weight of our economy and its job prospects is built on the outlook that people are empty.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“What they write in rule books and how things really work are never the same. We all learn that as we get older.”
Source: The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling
“Nobody gives you an education. If you want one, you have to take it.”
“It's been a horrifying academic secret for decades that the children who walk away with the highest formal honors, the valedictorians and National Merit Scholars, have a horrendous performance record in later life.”
“Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.”
“Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.”
“For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that's easy to manage.”
“Is it any wonder that Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of pre-empting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“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.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“Is there an idea more radical in the history of the human race than turning your children over to total strangers whom you know nothing about, and having those strangers work on your child's mind, out of your sight, for a period of twelve years? Could there be a more radical idea than that? Back in Colonial days in America, if you proposed that kind of idea, they'd burn you at the stake, you mad person! It's a mad idea!”
“As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.”
“• As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.”
“People are less than whole unless they gather themselves voluntarily into groups of souls in harmony. Gathering themselves to pursue individual, family, and community dreams consistent with their private humanity is what makes them whole; only slaves are gathered by others.”
Source: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
“Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.”
“You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill.”
“We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that.”
