Topic: Uncategorized, Matches 211 quotes.

Some children are dull and demand a slower learning pace; bright children require a rapid pace to develop their faculties. Furthermore, many children are apt in one subject and quite inept in another. They should be permitted to develop themselves in their best subjects and drop the poor ones. Whatever educational standards are imposed from outside, injustice is done to all—to the less able who cannot absorb any instruction, to those with different sets of aptitudes in different subjects, to the bright children whose minds would like to be off and winging in more advanced courses. Similarly, whatever pace the teacher sets in class is bound to be injurious to almost all—to the dull who cannot keep up and to the bright who lose interest. Moreover, those in the middle, the “average,” are not always the same in all classes and often are not the same from day-to-day in one class.

Source: Murray N. Rothbard
Education, Free and Compulsory: The Individual’s Education, p. 7.

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Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.

Source: Benjamin Rush
signer of the Declaration of Independence

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In the hands of private schoolmasters the curriculum expanded rapidly. Their schools were commercial ventures, and, consequently, competition was keen . . . . Popular demands, and the element of competition, forced them not only to add new courses of instruction, but constantly to improve their methods and technique of instruction.

Source: Robert F. Seybolt
Source Studies in American Colonial Education: The Private School, p. 102.

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According to Carl F. Kaestle, “Literacy was quite general in the middle reaches of society and above. The best generalization possible is that New York, like other American towns of the Revolutionary period, had a high literacy rate relative to other places in the world, and that literacy did not depend primarily upon the schools.” Another indication of the high rate of literacy is book sales. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in a colonial population of 3 million (counting the 20 percent who were slaves)-the equivalent of 10 million copies today. In 1818, when the United States had a population of under 20 million, Noah Webster’s Spelling Book sold over 5 million copies. Walter Scott’s novels sold that many copies between 1813 and 1823, which would be the equivalent of selling 60 million copies in the United States today. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper sold millions of copies. John Taylor Gatto notes that Scott’s and Cooper’s books were not easy reading. European visitors to early nineteenth-century America such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre du Pont de Nemours—marveled at how well educated the people were.

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p38-39

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The fundamental point to be made about parents and students is not that they are politically weak, but that, even in a perfectly functioning democratic system, the public schools are not meant to be theirs to control and are literally not supposed to provide them with the kind of education they might want. The schools are agencies of society as a whole, and everyone has a right to participate in their governance. Parents and students have a right to participate too. But they have no right to win. In the end, they have to take what society gives them.

Source: John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe
Politics, Markets and America’s Schools, p. 32.

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We want to save our children, and to have them partake of all the blessings that encircle the sanctified — to have them receive the blessings of their parents who have been faithful to the fullness of the gospel. We do not want them to wade through all the routine of false doctrines and erroneous systems that we have had to wade through in our generation.

Source: Wilford Woodruff
Discourses of Wilford Woodruff, p.268

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In one sense I am [an advocate of bad schools]. I maintain that we have as much right to have wretched schools as to have wretched newspapers, wretched preachers, wretched books, wretched institutions, wretched political economists, wretched Members of Parliament, and wretched Ministers. You cannot proscribe all these things without proscribing Liberty. The man is a simpleton who says, that to advocate Liberty is to advocate badness. The man is a quack and doctrinaire of the worst German breed, who would attempt to force all minds, whether individual or national, into a mould of ideal perfection, to stretch it out or to lop it down to his own Procrustean standard, I maintain that Liberty is the chief cause of excellence; but it would cease to be Liberty if you proscribed everything inferior. Cultivate giants if you please; but do not stifle dwarfs.

Source: Edward Baines

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There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure. If this principle really is not understood, let any parent holding a positive religious faith consider how it would seem to him if his children were taken by force and taught an opposite creed.

Source: Isabel Paterson
The God of the Machine, published in 1943

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We cannot safely substitute anything for the Gospel. We have no right to take the theories of men, however scholarly, however learned, and set them up as a standard, and try to make the Gospel bow down to them; making of them an iron bedstead upon which God’s truth, if not long enough, must be stretched out, or if too long, must be chopped off—anything to make it fit into the system of men’s thoughts and theories! On the contrary, we should hold up the Gospel as the standard of truth, and measure thereby the theories and opinions of men.

Source: Orson F. Whitney
General Conference, April 1915

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