selected quotations

You may have noticed in the right sidebar a rotating series of quotes. I uploaded a large collection of those I have found to be particularly significant. Most have come to my e-mail box via my signing up at liberty Tree for a daily trio.

While they aren’t all striking, many are. Those I save and share here.

The set below are most effective together. They came days apart, but relate to each other … and to us.

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“A family member asked my wife,
“Aren’t you concerned about his (our son’s) socialization with other kids?”
My wife gave this response:
“Go to your local middle school, junior high, or high school,
walk down the hallways, and tell me which behavior you see
that you think our son should emulate.” ”
— Manfred B. Zysk
German-American engineer and researcher

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“The National Education Association believes that
home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot
provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.”
— National Education Association Resolution

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“As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned
bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization
[in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.”
— Jerry Brown
[Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr.] (1938- ) US politician, Attorney General and former governor of California, former Mayor of Oakland, CA, former chair of the California Democratic Party

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“The teacher is engaged not simply in the training of individuals, but in the
formation of the proper social life…. In this way, the teacher always is the
prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.”
— John Dewey
(1859-1952) American philosopher, psychologist, professor, and progressive educational reformer.

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“In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek
in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.”
— Joseph Sobran
(1946-2010) Columnist

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“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.”
— John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
Source: On Liberty

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“Education is a weapon,
whose effect depends on who
holds it in his hands and
at whom it is aimed.”
— Josef Stalin
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR

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“We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses
hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 – 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union

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“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished … The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
— Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814) German philosopher, psychologist, considered the father of German nationalism
Source: Prussian University in Berlin, 1810, quoted by The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell, 1952

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“People who make careers out of helping others —
sometimes at great sacrifice, often not —
usually don’t like to hear that those others might get along fine,
might even get along better, without their help.”
— John Holt
(1923-1985) American author and educator, proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory

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“The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.”
— John Taylor Gatto
(1937-) American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: The Underground History of American Education, 2001