This is a collection of quotes (that I will continue to add to) which focuses on the negative aspects of public schooling. Of course there are positives as well, which aren't listed here. This page was created to shed some light on the negative aspects of public school which many people may not have considered before sending their children to school. For the enlightenment of all, whether you agree or disagree....
Public school is not the best way for everyone to learn:
“So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?”
― Steven James, Placebo
“You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.”
― Marilyn Howshall
“Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school environment, the teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn.”
― Gene Royer
“To learn how to do, we need something real to focus on — not a task assigned by someone else, but something we want to create, something we want to understand. Not an empty exercise but a meaningful, self-chosen undertaking.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert
“Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action. They have worthwhile ideas. They make perceptive connections. They’re individuals from the start: a unique bundle of interests, talents, and preferences. They have something to contribute. They want to be a part of things.
It’s up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work.”
― Lori McWilliam Pickert
Could be boring, not mentally stimulating:
“You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.”
― Roger Lewin
“To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.”
― Wendy Priesnitz
Confines "learning" to inside school buildings:
“The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.”
― John W. Gardner
Brainwashing- teaches ideas of men, instead of how to think for self:
“An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.”
― Thomas Moore
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.”
― James Beattie
“Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.”
― Richard Mitchell
“Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.”
― Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards"
Supresses moral courage:
“As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.”
― William Howard Taft
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