Schooling Quotes

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.”
― Jean Piaget

“What I learned on my own I still remember”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination.”
― J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life

“This idea that children won't learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, "positive and negative reinforcements," usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as if that were true, they will come to believe it is true. So many people have said to me, "If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything." Even worse, they say, "If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything."

It is the creed of a slave.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, "Because they're scared." I used to suspect that children's defeatism had something to do with their bad work in school, but I thought I could clear it away with hearty cries of "Onward! You can do it!" What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, and dealing with life. So we have two problems, not one: to stop children from being afraid, and then to break them of the bad thinking habits into which their fears have driven them.

What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it. Perhaps most people do not recognize fear in children when they see it. They can read the grossest signs of fear; they know what the trouble is when a child clings howling to his mother; but the subtler signs of fear escaping them. It is these signs, in children's faces, voices, and gestures, in their movements and ways of working, that tell me plainly that most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers, they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“...some nights I'd sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad's old Chevy - children need solitude - they don't teach that in school...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Do not give them a candle to light the way, teach them how to make fire instead. That is the meaning of enlightenment.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Property taxes' rank right up there with 'income taxes' in terms of immorality and destructiveness. Where 'income taxes' are simply slavery using different words, 'property taxes' are just a Mafia turf racket using different words. For the former, if you earn a living on the gang's turf, they extort you. For the latter, if you own property in their territory, they extort you. The fact that most people still imagine both to be legitimate and acceptable shows just how powerful authoritarian indoctrination is. Meanwhile, even a brief objective examination of the concepts should make anyone see the lunacy of it. 'Wait, so every time I produce anything or trade with anyone, I have to give a cut to the local crime lord??' 'Wait, so I have to keep paying every year, for the privilege of keeping the property I already finished paying for??' And not only do most people not make such obvious observations, but if they hear someone else pointing out such things, the well-trained Stockholm Syndrome slaves usually make arguments condoning their own victimization. Thus is the power of the mind control that comes from repeated exposure to BS political mythology and propaganda.”
― Larken Rose

“For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“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 Holt

“Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meeting
by a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he realized that his graduate students were using on him, and had used for the ten years and more he had been teaching there, all the evasive strategies I described in the book — mumble, guess-and-look, take a wild guess and see what happens, get the teacher to answer his own questions, etc.

But as I later realized, these are the games that all humans play when others
are sitting in judgment on them.”
― John Holt, How Children Fail

“We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that's the way of it”
― Ron Rash, Serena

“The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.”
― George P. Pelecanos, Soul Circus

“Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.”
― Amy Joy

“KODO SAWAKI: Studying originally meant aspiring to discover the meaning of life. These days studying has become all about getting a job.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Uses of Enchantment

“Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“I sighed and tried to return back to my schoolwork, but being bored of what I was learning, I gave time away to articles about Hypatia, precocity, young philosophers, and, during arbitrary, episodic moments, the [rubik's] cube. I was procrastinating, yet I still wanted to be diligent and academically edified.”
― Lucy Carter, For the Intellect

“Schooling in the art of freedom is not a luxury but a necessity. Civic education is essential for a free society. By ignoring the responsibility to hand on freedom, many Western societies are failing badly over the challenge of passing on the torch of freedom.”
― Os Guinness, The Magna Carta of Humanity: Sinai's Revolutionary Faith and the Future of Freedom

“I think I can say that effeminate homosexuals are among those who indulge least in sex acts with other boys at school. They seem to realize that these jolly get-togethers are really only a pooling of the carnal feelings of two people who deep down are interested in their dreams of girls. Otherwise they tend to be self-congratulatory pyrotechnical displays of potency.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it; for in mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct ratiocination occur. It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own. They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and self-contradictory thought, before their own thinking faculties are much advanced; a power which, for want of some such discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack; and when they have to answer opponents, only endeavour, by such arguments as they can command, to support the opposite conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists; and, therefore, at the utmost, leaving the question, as far as it depends on argument, a balanced one.”
― John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

“Education in the lower stages must be ‘national,’ it must have its roots in the soil. We must draw our mental pabulum from the culture of our own country. How can that be possible if one is transplanted at too early an age? No, we should not, as a rule, countenance the idea of sending boys and girls to schools abroad quite alone at an immature age. Education becomes international at the higher stages. It is then that students can, with profit, go abroad, and it is then that the East and the West can commingle to the benefit of both”
― Subhas Chandra Bose, An Indian Pilgrim

“We still need to offer more to our children than educational factories with the equivalent of terrible working conditions. We need to offer them a place to really flourish–every one of them.”
― Michael G. Thompson, Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children