Public Schools Quotes

“It isn't a coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being. The real explanation is less flattering. If the government's propaganda can take root as children grow up, those kids will be no threat to the state apparatus. They'll fasten the chains to their own ankles.”
― Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

“Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let’s face it, frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotation of ”the starving artist” and the mistaken concept of necessary talent”
― Betty Edwards, The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

“With modern technology it is the easiest of tasks for a media, guided by a narrow group of political manipulators, to speak constantly of democracy and freedom while urging regime changes everywhere on earth but at home. A curious condition of a republic based roughly on
the original Roman model is that it cannot allow true political parties to share in government. What then is a true political party: one that is based firmly in the interest of a class be it workers or fox hunters. Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common
party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.”
― Gore Vidal

“It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I’ve heard people say, "A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks," even though in today’s government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day.”
― Lawrence W. Reed

“Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.”
― Roddy Doyle

“The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side—and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”
― Ulysses S. Grant

“Trust in families and in neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, 'What is education for?' If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that's really not your business, and it shouldn't be your problem. Our type of schooling has deliberately concealed the fact that such a question must be framed and not taken for granted if anything beyond a mockery of democracy is to be nurtured. It is illegitimate to have an expert answer that question for you.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

“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

“History has been stolen from us and replaced with guilt inducing lies.”
― Stefan Molyneux

“The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us as a free nation. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side—and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”
― Ron Chernow, Grant

“Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Learning is not filling up a box but seeing and imagining what we can create with it.”
― Jill Telford

“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

“Onward Christian Lawyers

KELLY SHACKELFORD, LIBERTY LEGAL
INSTITUTE, PLANO, TEXAS

Kelly Shackelford founded Liberty Legal Institute in 1997 to fight for the protection of religious freedoms and First Amendment rights for individuals, groups, and churches. Shackelford clerked for a federal judge after law school.

"When their freedoms are taken away, the average person isn't 0. J. Simpson and can't just go out and hire the dream team. My heart has always been to make sure that those people have the best representation possible so that the government can't erode all of our freedoms by picking on the people who don't have the money to fight.

"Religion is the new pornography. If somebody says something religious, the average government official feels like he or she has to run from the room, screaming with their hair on fire. Religion is treated like pornography would be treated if you brought it into the school. I mean, there's a fear. There's a shame, almost, directed toward it.

"The ACLU is mainly operating on remote control. They've injected this chilling atmosphere that's antireligious in the schools and they don't even have to do anything in most instances to effectuate a religious cleansing in the schools. They've managed to scare and intimidate and the lore in school districts is religion is bad, religion will get you in trouble.

''I'd say a decent percentage of the time, the person who engages in the violation of our clients' rights is somebody who later will tell us, Tm a religious person.' They just didn't know any better, and what they're doing is reacting. They go to the kneejerk, shut-it-down action. 'Oh, it's religion? We must shut it down .' That is the general approach.

"These are young kids. They're in third grade or fourth grade or fifth grade. And the lesson they learn is there are words you can't say. You can't say these curse words, and then you can't say your religion. You can't talk about your religion. And it's a very powerful message.

"We had a case where the kids could could draw a tracing of their foot, then put a message on the drawing of their foot, and then put it up on the board in class. And all these kids had all these very innocuous messages, 'Jenny loves Johnny' and 'Peace' and such. A girl very innocently wrote 'Jesus Loves Me.' And the teacher ripped it down, and said to her, 'Don't you ever do this again.' The girl went home crying and wondering what she'd done wrong.

"The father was just infuriated. We called the school. And that time, the school had already realized they were in big trouble. And so they went back to this little girl and they told her, unbeknownst to any of us, 'Go ahead and do another - go ahead and do another one and put it up.' She redrew her foot. And instead of writing 'Jesus Loves Me' in the innocent and pure way she did before, she put a little tiny cross up in the very top corner that you could just barely see.

''And I thought, 'There's the picture of what happens inside to these little kids.' She's learned the lesson. Don't be open about your faith. Don't be honest about your faith. Hide it. You can still be whoever you are as long as you'll hide it. They taught her selfoppression and self-censorship through this hysterical reaction to her. They robbed her of that innocence and of that purity of being open about her faith.

"That's the sort of thing I decided to fight.”
― John Gibson, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought

“It's as if every classroom has its own pied piper luring children away from their parents, from their own desires—from whatever they'd known to be true before entering that school building. Who gave them the right to access our minds? Why did they think they had that authority? We were innocent children!”
― Philip Wyeth, Reparations Mind

“It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens. We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of common-school training in the South, that the national government must soon step in and aid popular education in some way. To-day it has been only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of the South that the Negro’s share of the school fund has not been cut down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that movement not only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength. What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“Some people think homeschooling is expensive. They think a good education has to have a massive budget — because that’s
what the public education system does — but in truth, throwing money at materials doesn’t get the job done. Giving children individualized learning experiences and the ability to grow and ask questions is more important.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“I think I can say that effeminate homosexuals are among those who indulge least in sex acts with other boys at school. They seem to realize that these jolly get-togethers are really only a pooling of the carnal feelings of two people who deep down are interested in their dreams of girls. Otherwise they tend to be self-congratulatory pyrotechnical displays of potency.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant