Wise Words...

I found these quotes in Peter Gray's blog Freedom to Learn (see blog roll) and they deserve to be spread far and wide. Also, I need a database of educational quotes for my writing so this may as well be the start. 

I will revisit this post to add more as I discover them. Enjoy!

Plato

• Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
• You can learn more about a person from an hour of play than a lifetime of conversation.

Mark Twain

• I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
• Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Oscar Wilde

• The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence.

Bertrand Russell

• Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
• Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Anne Sullivan 

• I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

Alice Duer Miller

• It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

Emma Goldman

• Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

Ivan Illich

• The public school has become the established church of secular society.
• Together we have come to realize that the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
• School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.

John Holt

• Organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them.That is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false. 

• Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.

John Taylor Gatto

• School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.

 H. L. Mencken

• 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.