Public School Quotes

“My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

“Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not. But if the grades are removed the class is forced to wonder each day what it’s really learning. The questions, What’s being taught? What’s the goal? How do the lectures and assignments accomplish the goal? become ominous. The removal of grades exposes a huge and frightening vacuum.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“We are supposed to call poison medicine and we wonder why we're always sick.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Didn't Frankenstein get married?"
"Did he?" said Eggy. "I don't know. I never met him. Harrow man, I expect.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Laughing Gas

“...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

“And whether or not the educators who are trying to raise up America's students can actually set and meet higher academic standards, our cultural values make their job next to impossible. It's so much easier for pundits and politicians to point out figures and blame the people who are in the trenches every day than it is to get in there with them, or even to find out what actually goes on in those trenches. It's so much easier for parents to blame teachers when their kids get in trouble than to do the heavy lifting required at home to keep kids on track. And it's so much easier for us as a nation to cross our fingers and hope that we'll "get lucky" with the innovative "solutions" being tested on America's schools today than it is for us to roll up our sleeves and invest our own time, talent, and money in the schools that are even now-- with or without us-- shaping our nation's future.”
― Tony Danza, I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High

“Behavior isn't something someone "has." Rather, it emerges from the interaction of a person's biology, past experiences, and immediate context.”
― L. Todd Rose

“Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.”
― Martin Gardner

“Tori glanced at the clock and bit back a curse. Hannah didn't need to learn any more bad words from her own mother. That's what public school was for.

Gayle, Eliza (2013-04-30). Levi's Ultimatum, Purgatory Masters Book 2 (Kindle Locations 197-198). Gypsy Ink Books. Kindle Edition.”
― E.M. Gayle, Levi's Ultimatum

“In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils, as rapidly and as painlessly as possible, with the largest conceivable outfit of current axioms, in all departments of human thought—to make the pupil a good citizen, which is to say, a citizen differing as little as possible, in positive knowledge and habits of mind, from all other citizens. In other words, it is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but this is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

“It hapens very often that parents think they are worred about the progress a boy is making. they do not realise that all boys are numskulls with o branes which is not surprising when you look at the parents really the whole thing goes on and on and there is no stoping it it is a vicious circle.”
― Geoffrey Willans

“The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget - this, and not my subpar public school, was te real barrior to opportunity.”
― J. D. Vance

“A poorly made car, sofa, or meal can be easily returned or discarded.  A poorly educated child cannot; factory recalls are not an option in education.  There will never be a day when the evening newscaster announces, 'Scottsdale High School issued a product recall on the graduating class of 2012.  If you currently employ a member of the class of ‘12, please return him or her to the district office for a class of ‘17 upgrade.”
― Oran Tkatchov, Success for Every Student: A Guide to Teaching and Learning

“As a teacher, no matter what grade level, no matter how hard you try to engage the entire
class or implement the suggestions above, you will still encounter “that one kid” who will get
under your skin: the class clown, the smart-ass, the student who acts like you are pulling his teeth every time you ask him to do something, the kid who always has to say “this is stupid.” They are just part of the clientele base we serve and they can drive us to drinking (figuratively
speaking…and sometimes literally).  
Please remember that you are the adult.  The negativity or resistance “that one kid” radiates can be handled in a way that does not disturb the class structure.”
― Oran Tkatchov, Success for Every Student: A Guide to Teaching and Learning

“Education is an operation of indoctrination. An apparatus of profit. If a teacher was given free rein to educate students, then the exploitative factions of commerce in the United States couldn't exist.”
― Jonathan Heatt, Teaching Las Vegas

“I'm never going to send my children to boarding school. The boys can go to P.S. 148 with gangsters, and then go to Columbia & the girls can go to Hunter College and they'll all be morons but at least they wont have to tear around and get their teeth knocked out playing hockey every day.

[Letter to R. Beverley Corbin, Jr, 3 October 1946]”
― Jackie Kennedy Onassis

“Thomas Edison was no an inventor but a very evil wealthy man with connections to the most wealthy Americans. He killed animals in order to demonize Nikola Tesla, the greatest inventor in human history. However, you will never learn about Tesla in any school system because he never wanted to be wealthy and his inventions were for the purpose of helping mankind. When JP Morgan, one of the most evil wealthy men in America, found out that Tesla wanted to give every human in the world free electricity, he stopped paying him and destroyed his invention to supply that free electricity. This is why you'll never learn about Tesla in the public school system.”
― James Thomas Kesterson Jr

“So take three instances at random. A young white college sophomore throws a Molotov cocktail that burns down a black-owned deli, and he does this because he wants to register his deep dissatisfaction with the police treatment of blacks in that city. Or another person, as timid as they come, is out for a walk on a bike path, two miles out of town, all by herself, and she is wearing a mask. Or someone else thinks that it can cost two dollars to get a gallon of milk to market, but also thinks that we can make the make the greedster grocer sell it for a buck fifty, and yet still have milk on the shelf. What do these, and countless other instances, have in common?

What they all have in common is that these people received a lousy education.

As we watch this great parade of duncical folly every night on the news, one thought should come back to haunt us with every fresh insult to right reason. And that thought should be, "Who educated these people?" And the follow-up question should be, "And why haven't they been sacked?”
― Douglas Wilson, Gashmu Saith It: How to Build Christian Communities that Save the World

“[W]e may infer that it is also not possible to gather pink grapefruit from your juniper bushes, or pine nuts from your tomato plants, or lemons trom youur box hedge. Pursuing the analogy relentlessly, we may also surmise that you cannot send your child to a culinary school and expect to get back a mechanical engineer. You cannot send them to art school, and wonder why your son never became a doctor like you wanted. You can't pay for law school, and then be surprised when an attorney eventually shows up. We often act astonished when we have no right whatsoever to be surprised in any way. We say, wide-eyed with Aaron, that all we did was put in a bunch of gold, and "out came this calf" (Exod. 32:24). That has to rank as one of the lamest excuses in the Bible, and here we are, still using it. All we did was put in hundreds of billions of dollars, and out came this misbegotten culture. How could this have happened? We are frankly at a loss.
And lest I be accused of being too oblique in the point I am seeking to make, you cannot send all the Christian kids off to be educated in a school system that is riddled with rank unbelief, shot through with relativism, and diseased with perverse sexual fantasies, and then wonder at the results you get.”
― Douglas Wilson, Gashmu Saith It: How to Build Christian Communities that Save the World

“It turns out that, however you might wish otherwise, you eventually wind up wherever it was you were going. If you get on the plane to Chicago, and I would ask you to follow me closely here, you are going to land in Chicago. We are now arriving where a godless education must necessarily go. The public schools in America were not secular, they were godless. The public schools in America were not neutral, they were godless. The public schools in America were not even agnostic, they were godless.”
― Douglas Wilson, Gashmu Saith It: How to Build Christian Communities that Save the World

“I was told that I shouldn’t pray in school because I might make the other kids uncomfortable.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“Both my mother and father had to go into my elementary school and argue with the principal on my behalf in order to protect my rights, multiple times.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner, Reclaiming Femininity: Saving Women's Traditions & Our Future

“I am not saying that the path I have chosen will work for everyone, and I am also not saying that the formal schooling system has no successes.

The prevalence of such arrogance is what has led us to adopt a uniform approach that has taken advantage of taxpayers, caused children to feel insufficient because they couldn't meet an absurd standard that held no relevance to their future success, and produced grown-ups lacking fundamental abilities required to sustain oneself, which is the ultimate benchmark of maturity.”
― Salatiso Mdeni, The Homeschooling Father, How and Why I got started.: Traditional Schooling to Online Learning until Homeschooling

“The tax funded formal school system has wasted taxpayer money, kept children away from their families, indoctrinated people to hate others on the basis of immutable characteristics or cumulative efforts of their ancestors, and caused the country to regress.”
― Salatiso Mdeni

“It should have been a warning from the beginning, of the detrimental effects of the institution, when attendance of a formal school was presented as though it was mandatory.

Why would one need to be forced to do what is good for them? No laws have ever been required to compel people to eat or breathe, all living entities instinctively know this and do it.

Rather than people wasting because they are not eating, obesity is a problem in prosperous countries. Laws are enacted to restrict eating certain foods because all living entities know nutrition is necessary, thus always seek it.”
― Salatiso Mdeni

“I used to firmly believe that prestigious schools, which encompasses both private schools and top-tier quantile 5 public schools with impressive graduation rates, held a clear advantage over lower-quality no fee public schools. That was, until Dr Thomas Sowell introduced me to the sorting function of the formal schooling system and the unfair advantage prestigious schools have since they can pick and choose who they admit.

From the outset they can choose to admit students of a certain intellect thus increasing the chances of these students performing favourably relative to no fee public schools that have an obligation to admit everyone.

Parents who can afford to send their child to private school are usually more involved and provide more resources for their child to succeed.

The ability of parents to afford the prohibitively high costs of the schools is also an indicator of the child’s abilities since his parents had it in them to work hard enough to earn what enabled to afford a prestigious school.

Once you have factored those aspects as a minimum, the prestigious school’s performance doesn’t seem that great. As long as the parents have resources to support the child’s learning environment, the type of school a child attends becomes less relevant.

This is why the quantile 5 public schools perform at the level of private schools. As the level of the parent’s material wealth increases such that more educational resources can be availed to the child, so does the performance of a child.

This, off course happens to a certain level as the law of diminishing return eventually kicks in.”
― Salatiso Mdeni