Topic: Education, Matches 61 quotes.

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

How to teach, how to improve children, are questions admitting of new and advanced solutions, no less than inquiries how best to cultivate the soil, or to perfect manufactures. And these improvements cannot fail to proceed indefinitely, so long as education is kept wide open, and free to competition, and to all those impulses which liberty constantly supplies. But once close up this great science and movement of mind from these invigorating breezes, whether by monopoly or bounty, whether by coercion or patronage, and the sure result will be torpor and stagnancy.

Source: Algernon Wells

Topics: Education

[The popular] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. And so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread the enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

Source: H. L. Mencken

Topics: Education

There is a general feeling that something is wrong with the public schools. The tendency is to blame the schoolma’ams. They seem to be responsible for the fact that the children learn very little and are generally bewildered. But the truth is that the schoolma’am herself is the victim. The real villains are the quacks who now run the American school system . . . and they ruin her as a teacher. Every year she is beset by a series of new arcana and forced to struggle with them on penalty of losing her job . . . . As a result teaching becomes a madness and the children learn next to nothing.

Source: H. L. Mencken, 1934

Topics: Education

Only when all parents, not just rich ones, have a truly free choice in education, when they can take their children out of a school they don’t like, and have a choice of many others to send them to, or the possibility of starting their own, or of educating their children outside of school altogether—only then will we teachers begin to stop being what most of us still are and if we are honest know we are, which is jailers and baby-sitters, cops without uniforms, and begin to be professionals, freely exercising an important valued, and honored skill and art.

Source: John Holt
What Do I Do Monday? (New York: Dutton, 1970), p. 265.

Topics: Education

The schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with its appropriate morsel and shock. And when this method doesn’t work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children—something they must diagnose and treat. All these assumptions are wrong.

Source: John Holt
Learning All the Time: How Small Children Begin to Read, Write,
Count, and Investigate the World Without Being Taught, pp. 151-52.

Topics: Education

[A principle] which cannot be too strenuously insisted upon, is, that in education the process of self-development should be encouraged to the fullest extent. Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible. Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction . . . . Those who have been brought up under the ordinary school-drill, and have carried away with them the idea that education is practicable only in that style, will think it hopeless to make children their own teachers. If, however, they will call to mind that the all-important knowledge of surrounding objects which a child gets in its early years is got without help—if they will remember that the child is self-taught in the use of its mother tongue—if they will estimate the amount of that experience of life, that out-of-school wisdom, which every boy gathers for himself . . . they will find it a not unreasonable conclusion, that if the subjects be put before him in right order and right form, any pupil of ordinary capacity will surmount his successive difficulties with but little assistance . . . . This need for perpetual telling is the result of our stupidity, not of the child’s.

Source: Herbert Spencer
Written between 1854 and 1859.
Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical. See pp. 124-28.

Topics: Education

Family-based learning—homeschooling is a misnomer because it wrongly suggests isolation—provides the best environment for self-teaching. No one knows a child better or cares more about him than his parents. No one is in a better position to accommodate a child’s unique needs and abilities. The one-to-one “student-teacher ratio” permits instant feedback and immediate adjustment. In other words, the efficiency, as well as the efficacy, of such learning is nonpareil. That explains why family-based learners outperform schooled children in every study.24 Moreover, family-based learning is the best—probably the only—way to fully respect how learning is embedded in everyday living. This is not to deny the value of formal instruction. Homeschoolers routinely patronize piano teachers, French instructors, dance studios, and Tae Kwon Do dojangs. That does not violate the principles we are discussing. They do so by choice and with the understanding that learning some things requires the help of people with specialized knowledge or skills. The so-called basics, however, are not among those things.

Family-based learning provides the opportunity for parents and children to declare their independence from the state’s educational system. They need not wait for any reforms. They can do it at once. Of course, the abolition of school taxes and a major reduction in the general burden of government would make it easier for families to turn to that form of education. The government’s monetary inflation of the 1970s forced many unwilling mothers to leave home in search of a paycheck. They and their children have suffered for it. That’s another government policy to thank for the decline of the family. In an economy unburdened by government, rising productivity would enable one earner to support a family. If needed, supplemental income could be produced from within the home; such opportunities have been greatly expanded by new technologies, such as home computers and desktop publishing, which in turn have made “telecommuting”—working at home—possible. In other words, family-based learning is not as difficult or as financially costly as people might think. As its practitioners can attest, the rewards are immense. It’s a matter of priorities.

Source: Sheldon Richman
Separating School & State, p94-95.

Topics: Education

•  ⟨⟨ 
•  ⟨ 
•   |  
•  ⟩ 
•  ⟩⟩