(Anti?) Education Quotes

I have begun to notice that the stores are gearing up for the start of school. With that in mind, I thought it would be a good time to re-read some old familiar quotes:


It is... nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreak and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. ~Albert Einstein

I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a somber grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.
~Winston Churchill

Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.
~ Winston Churchill

Meanwhile, education--compulsory schooling, compulsory learning--is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit.Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.
~John Holt Instead of Education

Schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes any more that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
~John Taylor Gatto

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 at home by myself.
~George Bernard Shaw

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
~Margaret Mead

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
~Bertrand Russell

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
~G.K. Chesterton, 1929

I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.
~Petronius (d. circa 66 CE) The Satyricon.

A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
~ Isabel Paterson

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.
~ Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto"