The aim of public education is not to spread 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. School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.

H.L. Mencken

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.

Chinese proverb

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936) British author

No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.

John Holt

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province.

Albert Einstein

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Alfred North Whitehead

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

Isaac Asimov

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Norman Douglas

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.

Robert M. Hutchins

I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.

Petronius (d. circa 66 CE) The Satyricon

Increasing parental and community involvement in local schools is one of the most important things we can do to improve education for all of America's children.

Message from Former Secretary Richard Riley to the Family Involvement Network of Educators (FINE) November, 2000

What you teach your own children is what you really believe in.

Cathy Warner Weatherford

Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found
state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure
implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.

Benjamin Disraeli (1874)

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

G. K. Chesterton