Freedom to Learn

School pokes your eyes out and uni teaches you to read Braille - Fred Emery

It's fine to take issue with methods, but Wilde's comment, "Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching," is just mean. It's uncalled for, not to mention patently false.

Thank you for this!

I am a recent college grad who has spent a long time thinking about thecorrelation between creative minds and a distaste for formal education.

I wrote a note on Facebook awhile back about Einstein's views on education, I found it fascinating and I had no idea he felt this way, though it makes sense. I think at the time I was just so fed up, I typed "famous people's views on education" or something along those lines into Google, and that's when I came across Einstein (and others) views on the subject.

This is a fantastic variety though--shared!

As a passionate homeschool mom, I love reading your blog and discovering new points of view on education.

Some of my favorite quotes:

Organized education operates on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them.

That is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false. – John Holt

And this one:

School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony. - John Taylor Gatto

And maybe one more:

The sole true end of education is simply this; to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do, this is effort spent in vain - Dorothy Sayers

“Compulsory education has aided nobody. It has imposed an unwarrantable constraint on the people it was intended to benefit; it has been asinine presumption on the part of the intellectuals to consider a smattering of mental acquirements of universal benefit. It is a form of sectarian bigotry.”

Great list, Peter. Here are a few selections from my collection:

"Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done." -Paul Graham

"I've sometimes wondered why those who would never dream of forcibly taking people's money to pay to support a religious belief they do not share have no hesitation at all in taking their money to support an educational philosophy they do not share." -Ron Paul

"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state." -Max Belz

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy - these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another." -John Gatto

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." -H.L. Mencken

"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system." Bertrand Russell

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." -Ivan Illich

"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."
- Albert Shanker, Former President of the American Federation of Teachers

Some of my favorite quotes are in there. I worked with a person who had a 160 IQ. "Do we rake or bale the hay first?" He was also convinced a rim wouldn't fit onto a John Deere tractor because it was white. If you enjoyed these quotes you should check out a documentary "Stupidity" narrated by Donald Sutherland.
How useful is a law degree with over 10 years experience working for one of the top firms in the province? The case was close to impossible to win. I mopped the floor with this lawyer's "case"; I have all but a high school diploma. A degree does not grant success.
It's reassuring to know there are others who view schooling as "wasteful". I know from first hand that a degree can be obtained without study because the prof likes you.
Please note that I have respect for those that pursue education (wherever that is) and not a degree.

Thank you, so much, Peter, for this list. It shall be referred to frequently.

Picking nits, Paul Simon's quote is from the song "Kodachrome," and it goes:

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It's a wonder I can think at all."

I like the word "crap" and think it improves the phrase rhythmically.

I have a series of posts about Einstein's views on education, and his experience with school, here.

A few other good quotes:

“Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.” --Anne Sullivan

"I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I think my deepest criticism of the educational system . . . is that it’s all based upon a distrust of the student. Don’t trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not." --Carl Rogers

"Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room, confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret commission, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it." --Tracy Kidder

“This business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog being jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable.” --George Orwell

"Fearlessness is the foundation of all education, the beginning and not the end. If you do not build on that foundation, the edifice of all your education will topple over." --Mahatma Gandhi

"Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism." --attributed to Wendell Phillips

I get bad mouthed for my favorite saying about teachers, students and education. "A student cannot fail, only his teacher can."
Thanks for being here.

This has to be one of the best articles I have ever read. The truly great break away from conformity. Now I can be sure that if I don't get into Harvard, even with my perfect SAT, I'm still destined for greatness.

"To be great, is to be misunderstood" - Emerson

"Once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference materials, be something you’re interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else… that’s what YOU are interested in, and you can ask, and you can find out, and you can do it in your own home, at your own speed, in your own direction, in your own time… Then, everyone would enjoy learning. Nowadays, what people call learning is forced on you, and everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class, and everyone is different.” ~ Isaac Asimov

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/11/7-must-read-books-on-e...

Dear Peter,

Thank you for all those wonderful quotes! They are like one-sentence sermons. I am including many of them in my own collection of quotes and am sharing some of mine below. Best wishes, and thanks again for encouraging us through your blog!

“Birds don’t go to flight school.” ~ Linda Dobson

"I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma."

-L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

Kids don’t resist learning; they resist teaching.

— John Taylor Gatto

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Because schools suffocate children’s hunger to learn, learning appears to be difficult and we assume that children must be externally motivated to do it.”

Wendy Priesnitz

"Do not train children to learn by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each."

-Plato

“Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.”

~ John Holt

"I was undisciplined by birth, never would I bend, even in my tender youth, to a rule. It was at home I learned the little I know. Schools always appeared to me like a prison, and never could I make up my mind to stay there, not even for four hours a day, when the sunshine was inviting, the sea smooth, and when it was joy to run about the cliffs in the free air, or to paddle in the water."

Claude Monet

"I'd encourage your youngest one to abandon kindergarten altogether. Almost everything I learned was learned outside the classroom, and school itself interrupted my education.

Moreover, school locks you in with your peers. That is a mistake. One's social circle should never include one's equals. From my earliest years I found children uninteresting and always preferred the company of adults. This was an advantage, because I got to know lots of folks who are dead now whom I never would have known if I had waited until I was an adult.

So I have a collective memory - an oral tradition - that goes back to the eighteenth century, having spoken with people who knew people who knew people who knew people who lived then.

The only real university is the universe and a city its microcosm. That is why an expression like "New York University" is foolish. New York City is the university….

Instead of school, children should spend some hours each day in hotel lobbies talking to the guests. They should spend time in restaurant kitchens and shops and garages of all kinds, learning from people who actually make the world work….

One day spent roaming through a real classical church building would be the equivalent of one academic term in any of our schools, and a little time spent inconspicuously in a police station would be more informative than all the hours wasted on bogus social sciences.

Formal lessons would only be required for accuracy in spelling and proficiency in public speaking, for which the public speakers in our culture are not models, and in exchange for performing some menial services a child could learn the violin, harp, and piano from musicians in one of the better cocktail lounges, or from performers in the public subways….

So I urge you to keep your child out of kindergarten, because kindergarten will only lead to first grade and then the grim sequence of grade after grade begins and takes its inexorable toll on the mind born fertile but gradually numbed by the pedants who impose on the captive child the flotsam of their own infecundity."

Fr. George Rutler

A couple years ago Apple started something called iTunesU where top universities upload lectures, and the whole library contains lectures from nearly every course you could think to look up, including speeches, and debates all available for free from any iTunes account.

When I found out about this I showed it to my father, who has used it to learn various things about whatever he wants and loves it. He works in the tech industry and anytime he tells anyone about it they haven't ever heard of it.

I thought he might be exaggerating about talking to 10 or 12 people about it, but I just tried to crash a couple classes for my math minor and was discussing covering prereq's I didn't have on iTunesU and neither the 2 professors nor my advisor had heard about it.

We have the solution to this antiquated system and no one even knows about it!

Until then we have to wait for Asimov's prediction to unfold before us