"Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence." ~ Albert Edward Wiggam

"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison." ~ William Glasser

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be school education that does it. ~ Alexandre Dumas

"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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. ~ H.L. Mencken

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency." ~ H.L. Mencken

It will generally be found that the most virtuous and the most intellectual, are those who have been brought up with few companions. ~ Jacob Abbot

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had loneliness and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work. ~ Carl Sandburg

I believe it would be much better for everyone if children were given their start in education at home. No one understands a child as well as his mother, and children are so different that they need individual training and study. A teacher with a roomful of pupils cannot do this. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

"All the government pushing of children into school at a younger age, have to do with neglected children and dysfunctional families (or jobs and tax money). At the worst, this approach can burn children out on book learning before they ever see how exciting it is. Preschool specialists almost unanimously agree that home is the best place for children under the age of 7. We have preschools for political reasons, job creation reasons and all sorts of other reasons, except for the best interests of the child. Ever since their origins in Europe, kindergardens were planned mainly to help neglected children. Today preschools are growing in the way that all bureaucracies grow. That is, if they can get all children enrolled, then the unions get more teacher jobs, union leaders get more money and power, etc., etc. Research that shows negative results from moving children out of the family and into the classroom doesn't get media attention, and there is plenty of such research." ~ Ruth Beechick, retired school teacher

"The Curriculum of Family is at the heart of any good life. We've gotten away from that curriculum; it's time to return to it. Schools are the major cause of weak families and weak communities." ~ John Taylor Gatto

"From the moment a child enters school he or she is age graded, sorted, labeled and resorted according to currently fashionable criteria. This is assembly-line education, in which the child is processed, over the years, much like a can of soup or a piece of hardware." ~ David Colfax, his four homeschooled sons attended Harvard University in the U.S.

"I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion - far from it - my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve. The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments, so many of the hallmarks of human excellence - insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage and originality - that I became confused.....I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was `dumbing them down.' Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the school bells, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, and the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behaviour." ~ John Taylor Gatto

"The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants children to grow up these days, least of all the children; and who can blame them? Toys are us." ~ John Taylor Gatto

"We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty rewards--gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists or Phi Beta Kappa keys--in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else." ~ John Holt

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The reasons WHY many of us are working to deschool society is summed up nicely by the following collection of quotes are from "The Freethinkers' Guide to the Educational Universe -- A Selection of Quotations on Education" Compiled by Roland Meighan, and published in 1994 by Educational Heretics Press, 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote Hills. Nottingham NG9 3FQ:

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

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- W. B. Yeats

"When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling." -- John Taylor Gatto

"What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child." -- George Bernard Shaw

"Education is a weapon, whose effects depend on who holds it in his hand and at whom it is aimed." -- Joseph Stalin

"The boy must be transformed into the man; in this school he must not only learn to obey, but must thereby acquire a basis for commanding later. He must learn to be silent not only when he is justly blamed, but must also learn, when necessary, to bear injustice in silence." -- Adolf Hitler

"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority." -- Stanley Milgram

"The best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms." -- Charles Handy

"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things." -- Plato

"Much of our expenditure on teachers and plant is wasted by attempting to teach people what they do not want to learn in a situation that they would rather not be involved in." -- Cohn Ward

"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." -- John Taylor Gatto

"Nobody grew taller by being measured." -- Philip Gammage

"When I was teaching in school, a man came to a parents' meeting and complained about the extraordinary mount of testing we were doing. His words went right to the heart of the matter: 'You're like a gardener who constantly pulls his plants up by the roots to see if they're growing.'" -- John Holt

"No teacher ever said: 'Don't value uncertainty and tentativeness, don't question questions, above all don't think!' The message is communicated quietly, insidiously, relentlessly and efficiently through the structure of the classroom: through the role of the teacher, the role of the student, ...the 'doings' that are praised or censured." -- Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

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

"Schools could become as obsolete as steam trains or paddle steamers." -- C. Everett

"School is the Army for kids. Adults make them go there, and when they get there, adults tell them what to do, bribe and threaten them into doing it, and punish them when they don't." -- John Holt

"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

"Home-schoolers as a rule have no quarrel with teachers. My own parents are both teachers; I've seen a lot of work that teachers do, on their own time and out of their own pockets. Our reservations are about the system of schooling -- not the people who are doing their best within it." - British Columbia Home-schooler

"Do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time." -- Old Hebrew Proverb

"From my earliest memories of school (going back some 60 years) right up to the present, I am struck by how recurrent are the standard complaints and how little things change. Students are still locked into classrooms, still chained to desks, still herded through lessons that are far from reality and cruelly indifferent to individual differences in brains, background, talent and feelings." -- Gene Lehman

"Obedient children go willingly to the trenches." -- Arthur Acton

"Whatever their claims, schools are training most young people to be habitually subservient." -- Chris Shute

"Education is indoctrination, if you are white - subjugation if you are black." -- James Baldwin

"Of my two 'handicaps', being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black." -- Shirley Chisholm

"We can no more ordain learning by order, coercion, and commandment than we can produce love by rape or threat." -- Peter Jones

"American kids like watching violence on TV and in the movies because violence is being done to them, both at school and at home. It builds up a tremendous amount of anger... The problem is not violence on TV. That's a symptom... The real problem is the violence of anti-life, unaffectionate, and punitive homes, and disempowering, deadening compulsory schooling, all presented with an uncomprehending smile." -- Jerry Mintz

"The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought to foster the wish for the truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth." -- Bertrand Russell

"Thousands of caring, humane people work in schools, as teachers, and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic; it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell." -- John Taylor Gatto

"Children are people; they grow into tomorrow only as they live today." -- John Dewey

"A school, like a fascist state, is about the business of compelling people to conform to a pattern of behaviour and a way of thinking decided by the few who hold power over them." -- Chris Shute

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." -- Derek Bok

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

"The adults of today spent twenty-five hours of their young lives learning quadratic equations, with varying degrees of success. Was it time well spent?" -- Philip Gammage

"School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know." -- John Taylor Gatto

"School is necessary to produce the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society." -- Ivan lllich

"When we put together in one scheme such elements as a prescribed curriculum, similar assignments for all students, lecturing as almost the only mode of instruction, standard texts by which all students are externally evaluated, and instructor chosen grades as the measure of learning, then we can almost guarantee that meaningful learning will be at an absolute minimum." - Carl Rogers

"Assessment, more than religion, has become the opiate of the people." -- Patricia Broadfoot

"A child born in the U.K. stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them." -- R. D. Laing

"The aim of education is to induce the largest amount of neurosis that an individual can bear without cracking up." -- W. H. Auden

"Do we create conflict by conditioning our children to pledge their allegiance, obey and defend their country without question? ... Or is he or she, by the very face of his or her commitment to and identification with the fragmented nationalistic view, paradoxically the enemy of peace?" -- Terrence Webster-Doyle

"All sorts of intellectual systems -Christianity, Socialism, Patriotism etc., - are ready, like orphan asylums~ to give safety in return for servitude. A free mental life cannot be as warm and comfortable and sociable as a lift enveloped in a creed." -- Bertrand Russell

"School has become the replacement for church in our secular society, and like church it requires that it teachings must be taken on faith." - John Taylor Gatto

"Show me a man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I'll show you a bully and a bore." -- Robert Morley

"The starting point is wonder, curiosity and the joy of discovery, which external compulsion is more likely to extinguish than ignite." - Philip Coggin

"The most beautiful thing in the world is, precisely, the conjunction of learning and inspiration. Oh, the passion for research and the joy of discovery!" -- Wanda Landowska

"I have never allowed schooling to interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain