...we have come to realise that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind concieves of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessable only to those who carry the proper tags.

When I trained as a teacher I was introduced to two basic roles. One was that of a crowd control steward... The other basic role was that of crowd-instructor

A recent MORI poll, commissioned by the Campaign for Learning, found that 90% of adults were favourably inclined towards further learning for themselves.....The bad news is that 75% said they were unhappy and alienated in the school environment and that, therefore, they preferred to learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other than a school-type setting.

I say above all else don't let your home become [a] miniture copy of the school. no lesson plans, no quizzes, no tests, no report cards! even leaving your child alone would be better; at least they would figure out some things on their own. Live together as well as you can; enjoy life together as much as you can.

It is hard not to feel that there must be something very wrong with much of what we do in school, if we feel the need to worry so much about what many people call 'motivation'. A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing.

How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task. When we feel powerful and competent, we leap at difficult tasks. The difficulty does not discourage us; we think:"Sooner or later, I'm going to get this." At other times we can only think: "I'll never get this, it's too hard for me, I never was any good at this kind of thing, why do I have to do it," etc. Part of the art of teaching is being able to sense which of these moods learners are in. People can go from one mood to the other very quickly.

There are times when even the most skilful learner must admit to himself that for the time being he is trying to butt his head through a stone wall, and that there is no sense in it. At such times teachers are inclined to use students as a kind of human battering ram. I've done it too often myself. It doesn't work.

A word to the wise, or even the unwise, is infuriating because it is insulting. When we teach without being asked, we are saying, in effect, 'You're not smart enough to know that you should know this, and not smart enough to learn it.

Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children.

When they learn in their own way and for their own reasons, children learn so much more rapidly and effectively than we could possibly teach them, that we can afford to throw away our curricula and our timetables, and set them free, at least most of the time, to learn on their own.

What is essential is to realise that children learn independently, not in bunches; that they learn out of interest and curiosity, not to please or appease the adults in power; and that they ought to be in control of their own learning, deciding for themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him.

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

There is one thing at least of which there is never so much as a whisper inside the popular schools; and that is the opinion of the people. The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

Only the educated are free.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.

Education is hanging around until you've caught on.

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equaliser of the conditions of man, - the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

School days are the unhappiest in the whole span if human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, with brutal violations of common sense and common decency.

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

The majority of parents feel affection for their children, and this sets limits to the harm they do them. But education authorities have no affection for the children concerned; at best, they are actuated by public spirit, which is directed towards the community as a whole, and not merely towards the children; at worst, they are politicians engaged in squabbles for plums

Another merit of home is that it preserves the diversity between individuals. If we were all alike, it might be convenient for the bureaucrat and the statistician, but it would be very dull, and would lead to a very unprogressive society."

An orchestra requires men with different talents and, within limits, different tastes; if all men insisted upon playing the trombone, orchestral music would be impossible. Social co-operation, in like manner, requires differences of taste and aptitude, which are less likely to exist if all children are exposed to the same influences than if parental differences are allowed to affect them

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction havenot yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicatelittle plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom;without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.

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. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food handed out under such coercion were to be selected accordingly.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world

if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world, so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

The middle years should be so busy, so demanding, so active, so adventurous that adolescents should barely have time for introspection.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more thanwe can ever learn from books.

their ability to see the point in learning the darn thing anyway, the chances are that they will take in very little.

It could be argued that teachers are the best people to teach our children as they have been specially trained for this. But just as equipment is only of vale if the child learns through its use - it has no worth otherwise - the qualifications of the teachers are of little value unless the child is actually learning.

Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must taught to think.

I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.

I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.

The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents, so they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.

Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.

I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For 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.

There can be no education without leisure, and without leisure education is worthless.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

"I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes."

Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him towards a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor... And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.

We should use kids' positive states to draw them into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies....You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure from being engaged in.

Everyone, at present, is in favour of having students learn the fundamentals. For most people, 'the three R's', or some variation of them, represent what is fundamental to a learner. However, if one observes a learner and asks oneself, "What is it that this organism needs without which he cannot thrive?", it is impossible to come up with the answer, "the three R's".

English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you 'take' and when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of Education?)

The Government's favourite formula for raising educational standards has the merit of simplicity. We are now top of the European league table in at least one respect: our children are subjected to more national school exams than those in any other country......Parents may comfort themselves with the thought that, however badly educated their children may be when they leave school, they will at least be able to do exams.

The newer and broader picture suggests that the child emerges into literacy by actively speaking, reading, and writing in the context of real life, not through filling out phonics worksheets or memorising words

We prefer that they [the children] should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not, - how much does the youth know when he has finished his education - but how much does he care and about how many orders of things does he care?

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again.

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D. or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B.

When you make the finding yourself - even if you are the last person on Earth to see the light - you will never forget it.

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

For thousands of years, in thousands of places, families educated their own. This tradition changed not because a better method was found but because economic conditions required it. To work one had to lreave one's children; one's children, furthermore, had to be trained for tasks no-one in their purview could be seen doing. For these reasons institutionalised schooling was invented' and while it adequately addressed a set of economic problems it inspired a new set of human ones that are psychological, emotional, and even spiritual in nature.

I do not pine for a different place and time. I only point out what we have traded off. I think certain good things are recoverable, though without the life that once surrounded them they must inevitably take on different meanings. One of these is the tradition of parental and communal responsibility for the daily instruction of the young. Today this is denied us because teaching has been institutionalised, a convenience in a time of industry and profit when citizen-labourers perform economic functions more efficiently without children present. But for whom is such a state of affairs indeed convenient?

Learning theory tells us to teach children as individuals who learn in their own unique manner. The finest possible curriculum is precisely the one that starts with each child's singular means of learning. Instruction and guidance are best provided by those with an intimate understanding of the individual child and a deep commitment to the child's education. these principles derive not merely from the homeschooling movement but from contemporary research into how children learn. They are not merely adages fabricated by homeschoolers but precepts grounded in a science that should inspire us to reconsider both our roles as parents and the shape of public education.

The opportunity to develop and practise social skills in school is quite limited. Children spend nearly all their time in school with other children born during the same academic year as themselves, and a great deal of time outside school as well. In school, there is little social contact with younger or older children and even less with adults. It is easy to see how peer mores, values and codes of behaviour become entrenched, resulting in considerable pressure to conform and the threat of ostracism or exclusion from the group for those who do not. Moreover, up to one and a half hours a day in school is specifically set aside for social recreation in the playground, where children are thrown together with nothing much to do. It is not surprising that playground hierarchies emerge and bullying is rife.

The consequence is that the 'social' skills acquired are those which may be essential for survival in school but have little applicability in the outside world. There is virtually no opportunity to relate socially to adults in school in order to learn wider social skills. Ironically, such skills can only be learned outside school hours. Teachers do, of course, set up social scenarios and discuss with children how to behave in given social circumstances. But these are no substitute for learning through real-life, dynamic social contact

School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school....my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in.

I think children can be very cruel especially in adolescence and if you are slow, and I was (I was in a school which was quite competitive) you do get a lot of slamming about from the other kids. I don't know about girls, but I know that boys are very cruel and very tough. It built up a tremendous resentment in me because I was also bad at sport and athletics and all I could do was play the piano. So I always got the sense in my adolescent years that 'Oh, Hopkins, you know he's, well he's not worth much, or he's a failure.

We live in a hierarchical world in which we defend ourselves ....from our eternal infancy and childhood by insisting on a graded, necessary elevation through learning and technological sophistication out of the child into the adult. This is not a true initiation that values both the previous form of existence and the newly attained one; it is a defence against the humiliating reality of the child.

Education means "to lead out." We seem to understand this as leading away from childhood, but maybe we could think of it as eliciting the wisdom and talents of childhood itself. As A.S.Neill, founder of the Summerhill School, taught many years ago, we can trust that the child already has talents and intelligence. We believe that the child intellectually is a tabula rasa, a blank blackboard, but maybe the child knows more than we suspect.

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.

Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do. These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, 'hyper' children - all words invented by adults in defence of their misunderstanding.

Often it was not in school, but outside of it - in extracurricular activities or during time spent altogether away from school - that calling appeared. It is as if the image in the heart in so many cases is hampered by the program of tuition and its time bound regularity.

Childhood placed at a tangent to adulthood, perceived as special and magical, precious and dangerous at once, has turned into some volatile stuff - hydrogen, or mercury, which has to be contained. The separate condition of the child has never been so bounded by thinking, so established in law as it is today......How we treat children really tests who we are, fundamentally conveys who we hope to be.

By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is.

1. Confusion 2. Class Position 3. Indifference 4. Emotional Dependency

5. Intellectual Dependency 6. Provisional Self-Esteem 7. One Can't Hide. It is the great triumph of compulsory, government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things

It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society's goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don't get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn.

It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior. I realise increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior. I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.

It appears, therefore, that some development of the capacity to be alone is necessary if the brain is to function at its best, and if the individual is to fulfil his highest potential. Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning, thinking, innovation and maintaining contact with one's own inner world are all facilitated by solitude

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