Quotes

Here are several quotes about schools and education that caught my eye recently. I'm beginning to agree with the sentiment behind them more and more, although I still have several major oppositions to a completely anti-formal-schooling mindset.

"On your own, you have to face the responsibility for how you spend time. But in school you don't. What they make you do may obviously be a waste but at least the responsibility isn't charged to your account. School in this respect is, once again, like the army or jail. Once you're in, you may have all kinds of problems but freedom isn't one of them." - Jerry Farber

"The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall appart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness." - Jules Henry

‎"School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity." - Jules Henry

"Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school." - Winston Churchill

“School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.” - Ivan Illich