For more than a hundred years much complaint has been made of the unmethodical way in
which schools are conducted, but it is only within the last thirty that any serious
attempt has been made to find a remedy for this state of things. And with what result?
Schools remain exactly as they were.
John Amos Comenius The Great Didactic, 1632
A teacher who is consistently fair, kindly and honest - whatever his religious convictions
- does more moral good in a school than a year of religious assemblies.
Balaam
Non sine dis animosus infans.
An adventurous child, thanks to the Gods.
Horace
Parents can plant magic in a child's mind through certain words spoken with some thrilling
quality of voice, some uplift of the heart and spirit.
Robert MacNeil
"What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering
brook."
--Henry David Thoreau
"The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be
useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful."
--Mark Twain
The golden rule is, to help those we love to escape from us; and never try to begin to
help people, or influence them till they ask, but wait for them
Friedrich Von Hugel
I know no disease of the soul but ignorance:... a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's
life, the disturber of his reason and common confounder of truth.
Ben Jonson
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is
acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato, The Republic. Book VII. 536
When the Russians beat us into space, the public blamed the schools, not realizing that
the only thing that had been proved was that their German scientists had gotten ahead of
our German scientists.
Lawrence Cremin
First God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain
If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming
it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
"Maxims for Revolutionists: How to Beat Children"
I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly or more
willfully obstinate.
Michel de Montaigne
If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.
Norman Douglas
I said...how, and why, young children, were sooner allured by love, than driven by
beating, to attain good learning.
'The Schoolmaster' (1570)
On school vouchers:
"this is objected to by some "liberals" because blacks who take this
opportunity to get ahead and leave the ghetto public schools would leave behind only the
children of "the least educated, least ambitious, and least aware." In other
words, black parents who want to make a better future for their children must be stopped
and their children held hostage in the public schools until such indefinite time as all
other people in the ghetto share their outlook. Ethnic minorities in the past rose out of
the slums layer by layer, but for blacks it must be all or none! This arrogant treatment
of millions of other human beings as pawns or guinea pigs would be impossible when parents
have individual choice. That is precisely why both the education establishment and the
social tinkerers are opposed to it.
Thomas Sowell American Education 1982
.