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

Topics: Uncategorized

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

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

Topics: Uncategorized

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

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