To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself–that is the first duty of the educator.

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This...

The trouble with school is they give you the answer, then they give you the exam. That’s not life….

To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern...

I did most of my schooling in Miami.

No teacher has the right to cure a child of making noises on a drum. The only curing that should be practiced is the curing of unhappiness.

We had some good times at school. I didn’t know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that’s the way of it

One hundred will go to my mother, sir, and the other I shall spend on schooling.” Jack Creamer, aged ten.

Yet that is considered an excellent school, and I dare say it would be if the benighted lady did not think it necessary to cram her pupils like Thanksgiving turkeys, instead of feeding them in...

Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.

In the race of life I would rather to be around the best and sink than to be around mediocrity and swim.

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative,...

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

Schools train you to be ignorant with style […] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you’re just smart enough to do a...

If we spark a student’s passion, we unleash a powerful force upon the world.

I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that.

Education is for freedom – freedom from mental slavery.

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned...

There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon...

I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that...

all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies — the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe....

Half of teachers leave the profession within their first four years, and kids with behaviour challenges and their parents are cited as one of the major reasons.

This idea that children won’t learn without outside rewards and penalties, or in the debased jargon of the behaviorists, “positive and negative reinforcements,” usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat children long enough as...

School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong,...

Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a...

For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act unintelligently at school. The simple answer is, “Because they’re scared.” I used to suspect that children’s defeatism had something to do with their...

rebels and troublemakers”) are creating the business structures of this new paradigm.You know who I am talking about. Steve Jobs, Richard Branson…

In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away.

Not long after the book came out I found myself being driven to a meetingby a professor of electrical engineering in the graduate school I of MIT. He said that after reading the book he...

…some nights I’d sneak out and listen to the radio in my Dad’s old Chevy – children need solitude – they don’t teach that in school…

Schooling gives you knowledge, but education makes you wise.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which...

What I learned on my own I still remember

We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future.

One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive – very, very restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence,...

Schooling is a manufacturing process whereby the raw material called curious boys is turned into products called obedient men.

The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.