Topic: Education, Matches 61 quotes.

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, p. 31

Topics: Education

Whatever you do, be careful in the selection of teachers. We don’t want infidels to mold the minds of our children. They are a precious charge bestowed upon us by the Lord, and we cannot be too careful in rearing and training them. I would rather have my child taught the simple rudiments of a common education by men of God, and have them under their influence, than have them taught in the most abstruse sciences by men who have not the fear of God in their hearts.

Source: President John Taylor
The Gospel Kingdom, p. 273.

Topics: Education

In relation to the education of the world generally, a great amount of it is of very little value, consisting more of words than ideas; and whilst men are verbose in their speaking or writing, you have to hunt for ideas or truth like hunting for a grain of wheat among piles of chaff or rubbish. It is true that a great amount of it is really valuable and it is for us to select the good from the bad. The education of men ought to be adapted to their positions both as temporal and eternal beings.

Source: President John Taylor
The Gospel Kingdom, p. 269

Topics: Education

Parents are commanded by revelation to teach their children these principles of the gospel... Then they go to school and find these glorious principles ridiculed and denied by the doctrines of men founded on foolish theories which deny that man is the offspring of God... These theories so dominate the secular education of our youth. They are constantly published in our newspapers, in magazines and other periodicals, and those who believe in God and his divine revelations frequently sit supinely by without raising a voice of protest. Under these conditions, is it any wonder the student is confused? He does not know whether to believe what his parents and the Church have taught him, or to believe what the teacher says and is written in the textbook. Naturally, students have confidence in their teachers and as confidence increases, there comes a lack of confidence in the doctrines of the Church and the parental instruction.

Source: President Joseph Fielding Smith
Man: His Origin and Destiny, p.2-3.

Topics: Education

It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.

Source: Albert Shanker
President, American Federation of Teachers

Topics: Education

A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia’s ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans’ was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influences.

Source: John Taylor Gatto
“Our Prussian School System,” p. 10

Topics: America, History; Education

One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year . . . . It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry—especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.

Source: Albert Einstein
(a “product” of the prussian school system)
Quoted in Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation and The Community of Scholars

Topics: Education

Historians have offered conflicting interpretations of the common-school and compulsory-education movement. Some see it intended as a cure for poverty, crime, and class tensions; others see it as a pro-democracy movement; others believe it was an upper-class movement motivated by a fear of instability in the working class; another group of writers sees it as a vast mill to serve the industrial system; and still others see it as a mechanism for imposing an American Protestant ideology. Barry Poulson points out that labor unions supported compulsory attendance laws because they kept children out of the workforce and reduced competition. It is likely that all these intentions were at work in the movement. The key point is that each shared the view that the coercive apparatus of government should be used to override the preferences of free citizens and to interfere with the spontaneous growth of society; in other words, all were contrary to the liberalism on which the United States was founded. To the extent that the common-school founders saw the system as essential for the moral education of children, they were operating on an anti-family premise. Parents could not be trusted to raise children of high character. Once again, the government was thought to know better than parents in matters of morality, an area of life well within the grasp of common people. In an essential respect, then, the common school took children from their parents. As Horace Mann put it, “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.”

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p. 47-48

Topics: Education

A leading disciple of [Herbert] Spencer’s, Auberon Herbert, found another form of dependence fostered by the public schools in his 1880 essay “State Education: A Help or Hindrance?” Herbert stated as a maxim that “no man or class accepts the position of receiving favors without learning, in the end, that these favors become disadvantages.” He then asserted that state education is a political favor: “Whenever one set of people pay for what they do not use themselves, but what is used by another set of people, their payment is and must be of the nature of a favor, and does and must create a sort of dependence,” namely, the dependence of working people on the upper classes, whose members run the school systems. “The most striking result [of public education] is that the wealthier class think that it is their right and their duty to direct the education of the people. They deserve no blame. As long as they pay by rate and tax for a part of this education, they undoubtedly possess a corresponding right of direction.” So “the workman is selling his birthright for the mess of pottage. Because he accepts the rate and tax paid by others, he must accept the intrusion of these others into his own home affairs—the management and education of his children.”

The remedy for that dependence, Herbert wrote, was for the working class to renounce the school system, “reject all forced contributions from others, and do their own work through their own voluntary combinations.” He expected that “the most healthy state of education will exist when the workmen, dividing themselves into natural groups according to their own tastes and feelings, organize the education of their children without help, or need of help, from outside.”

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p64-65.

Topics: Education

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