Topic: Education, Matches 61 quotes.

Free Education is Great?

I am opposed to free education as much as I am opposed to taking property from one man and giving it to another who knows not how to take care of it.

I now pay the school fee of a number of children who are either orphans or sons and daughters of poor people. But in aiding and blessing the poor I do not believe in allowing my charities to go through the hands of a set of robbers who pocket nine-tenths themselves, and give one-tenth to the poor. Therein is the difference between us.

I am for the real act of doing and not saying. Would I encourage free schools by taxation? No!

Source: Brigham Young
Journal of Discourses, Vol.18, p.357

Topics: Education

The Law and Education

You say: “There are persons who lack education,” and you turn to the law. But the law is not, in itself, a torch of learning which shines its light abroad. The law extends over a society where some persons have knowledge and others do not; where some citizens need to learn, and others can teach. In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge. But in this second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law

Topics: Education

A Confusion of Terms

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law

Topics: Education; Socialism

Brigham Young on Education

We had to pay our own school teachers, raise our own bread and earn our own clothing, or go without, there was no other choice. We did it then, and we are able to do the same to-day. I want to enlist the sympathies of the ladies among the Latter-day Saints, to see what we can do for ourselves with regard to schooling our children. Do not say you cannot school them, for you can. There is not a family in this community but what we will take and school their children if they are not able to do it themselves; and we do not do it through begging in the East and telling what others have told there about this people, and about their own efforts to establish free schools here. I understand that the other night there was a school meeting in one of the wards of this city, and a part there—a poor miserable apostate—said, “We want a free school, and we want to have the name of establishing the first free school in Utah.” To call a person a poor miserable apostate may seem like a harsh word; but what shall we call a man who talks about free schools and who would have all the people taxed to support them, and yet would take his rifle and threaten to shoot the man who had the collection of the ordinary light taxes levied in this Territory—taxes which are lighter than any levied in any other portion of the country? We have no other schools but free schools here—our schools are all free. Our meetings are free, our teachings are free. We labor for ourselves and the kingdom of God.

Source: Brigham Young
Journal of Discourses
Vol.16, p.19 - p.20, April 7, 1873

Topics: Education

Light and liberty go together.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1795.

Topics: Education

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Madison Version FE 4:480

Topics: Education

We are now trusting to those who are against us in position and principle, to fashion to their own form the minds and affections of our youth... This canker is eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once, will be beyond remedy.

Source: Thomas Jefferson to James Breckinridge, 1821. ME 15:315

Topics: Education

I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.

Source: Thomas Jefferson: Reply to American Philosophical Society, 1808.

Topics: Education

In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed . . . . No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

Source: Noah Webster
Reply to a Letter of David McClure on the Subject of the Proper
Course of Study in the Girard College, Philadelphia. New Haven
October 25, 1836

Topics: Christianity; Education

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