"The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms.
If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious.
If it injures the conscience it is criminal."
Henri Frederic Amiel, Source: Journal, 17 June 1852
William Bennett (1993)
"The belief that government schools are neutral on morality and religion is extraordinarily naive. Once it becomes clear that government schools indoctrinate captive students in the tenets and dogma of humanism to the exclusion of all other religions, it also becomes clear that the government itself is in the business of establishing a state-run, religious monopoly. It is time for the total privatization of schools and the building of a wall of separation between state and education."
Samuel Blumenfeld, Is
Public Education Necessary?, p. 30
"Time is the best teacher. Unfortunately, it kills all its students."
Jean De La Bruyère
"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."
Edmund Burke
"My education was interrupted only by my schooling."
"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."
Winston Churchill
Robert L. Dabney, Discussions: Secular, 4:222f
"It is the teaching of the Bible and of sound Political ethics that the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents. The theory that the children of the Commonwealth are the charge of the Commonwealth is a pagan one, derived from heathen Sparta and Platoís heathen republic, and connected by regular, logical sequence with legalized prostitution and the dissolution of the conjugal tie."
Robert L. Dabney, Discussions,
4:194
Benjamin Disraeli
(1874)
"It is almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the
holy curiosity of inquiry."
Albert Einstein
"Let's pass more gun control laws and buy metal detectors for every public school in the land -- anything but tell kids that life is sacred, because its Creator deems it so."
"I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralised system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen."
A. A. Hodge (1823-1886)
"The only foundation for useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion."
"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." These differences between pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have - I believe the English already use the phrase - "parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is now possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! - by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT."
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast (1959)
"I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures, and engraving them on the hearts of youth. I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution in which men and women are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must be corrupt."
Martin Luther (1483-1546)
"If we give the bureaucrats our children, we may as well give them everything else."
"I do not see how anyone can contemplate present-day educational conditions without seeing that something is radically wrong. And about one thing that is wrong - indeed by far the most important thing - there can be no doubt. It is found in the widespread ignorance of the Christian religion as that religion is founded upon the Word of God.... I do not believe that there can be any truly comprehensive science that does not take account of the solid facts upon which the Christian religion is based. Hence I sympathize fully with your desire to promote an education that shall be genuinely Christian. And I pray that those who, like you, wherever they may be, cherish such a desire may not be discouraged by the opposition of the world. You represent a cause which cannot ultimately fail."
"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be 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 over the body. ... All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects are evil."
John
Stuart Mill,
On
Liberty (1859)
"Education, the great mumbo-jumbo and fraud of the age, purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. For the most part it only serves to enlarge stupidity, inflate conceit, enhance credulity and put those subjected to it at the mercy of brain-washers with printing presses, radio and TV at their disposal."
Malcolm
Muggeridge,
1966
Chester
Pierce,
Professor
of Education in the faculty of Medicine and Graduate School of
Education,
Harvard University
Tommy Rogers, An
Epistemology for Dominion, p. 80
"Restoring prayer ... will scarcely at this date solve the grievous public school problem. Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3 R's or in keeping simple order within the schools. Any plan to begin dismantling the public school monstrosity is met with effective opposition by the teachers' and educators' unions. Truly radical change is needed to shift education from public to unregulated private schooling, religious and secular, as well as home schooling by parents."
"It's time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic
system in which everybody's role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives
for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve:
It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."
Albert Shanker, former President of the American Federation of Teachers [1989]
"Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance.
Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of knowledge by promoting
"self-esteem" and encouraging them to have opinions on things of which they are grossly
ignorant, if not misinformed."
Thomas Sowell
Arthur
Wellesley
(1769-1852)