Educational System Quotes

“Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...”
― Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

“All the games were selected for them by supervisors and had to have some useful, educational purpose. The children learned these new games but unlearned something else in the process: they forgot to be happy, how to take pleasure in little things and last, but not least, how to dream”
― Michael Ende, Momo

“We aren’t encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not?”
― Sir Ken Robinson

“Education should not be a competition resulting in winners and losers. Education should be a competition against ignorance, and all should be encouraged to win.”
― K.A. Brill

“You can be an expert any field of study with consistent effort and consistent learning.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Get ready the greatest new educational facility at the approximate dynamic population center of the North American continent”
― Buckminster Fuller

“The principal reason that districts within states often differ markedly in per-pupil expenditures is that school funding is almost always tied to property taxes, which are in turn a direct function of local wealth. Having school funding depend on local wealth creates a situation in which poor districts must tax themselves far more heavily than wealthy ones, yet still may not be able to generate adequate income. For example, Baltimore City is one of the poorest jurisdictions in Maryland, and the Baltimore City Public Schools have the lowest per-pupil instructional expenses of any of Maryland's 24 districts. Yet Baltimore's property tax rate is twice that of the next highest jurisdiction.(FN2) Before the funding equity decision in New Jersey, the impoverished East Orange district had one of the highest tax rates in the state, but spent only $3,000 per pupil, one of the lowest per-pupil expenditures in the state.(FN3) A similar story could be told in almost any state in the U.S.(FN4) Funding formulas work systematically against children who happen to be located in high-poverty districts, but also reflect idiosyncratic local circumstances. For example, a factory closing can bankrupt a small school district. What sense does it make for children's education to suffer based on local accidents of geography or economics?
To my knowledge, the U.S. is the only nation to fund elementary and secondary education based on local wealth. Other developed countries either equalize funding or provide extra funding for individuals or groups felt to need it. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled, but for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child, exactly the opposite of the situation in the U.S. where lower-class and minority children typically receive less than middle-class white children.(FN5) Regional differences in per-pupil costs may exist in other countries, but the situation in which underfunded urban or rural districts exist in close proximity to wealthy suburban districts is probably uniquely American.
Of course, even equality in per-pupil costs in no way ensures equality in educational services. Not only do poor districts typically have fewer funds, they also have greater needs.”
― Robert E. Slavin

“If you don’t have common sense, ask someone who does”
― Sonya Withrow

“In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils, as rapidly and as painlessly as possible, with the largest conceivable outfit of current axioms, in all departments of human thought—to make the pupil a good citizen, which is to say, a citizen differing as little as possible, in positive knowledge and habits of mind, from all other citizens. In other words, it is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but this is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“Valda said that if you change your residence every six months you can legally free your children from compulsory education.”
― John Cage, M: Writings '67–'72

“Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.”
― John Dewey

“Whenever judges of the highest state courts have actually examined the details of the "savage inequalities" that continue to be imposed on most low-income and minority students in the United States, they have virtually unanimously held that these conditions deny students the opportunity to be educated at the basic levels that are needed to function well in contemporary society.”
― Michael A. Rebell, Courts and Kids: Pursuing Educational Equity through the State Courts

“A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future”
― Drew Gilpin Faust

“It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“There's a strange lack of knowledge about the role of drag queens in our culture. I attribute this to the appalling state of our country's educational system. Others might blame an utter lack of interest. Who am I to judge?”
― Josh Kilmer-Purcell, I Am Not Myself These Days