"Daddy's gone across the ocean,
Leaving just a memory,
A snapshot in the family album.
Daddy, what else did you leave for me?
Daddy, whatcha leave behind for me?
All in all it was just a brick in the wall.
All in all it was just the bricks in the wall.

We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall." Pink Floyd "Another Brick In The Wall"

"College isn't the place to go for ideas." Helen Keller

"Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices." Laurence J. Peter

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

"To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains." Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole, 1938

"My business is not to argue and compare ; my business is to create. I must create a system for myself, or else be the slave of some other man's." William Blake

"The schools ain't what they used to be and never was." Will Rogers

"Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence." A. E. Wiggan

"Education with inert ideas is not only useless, it is above all things harmful." A N Whitehead

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." George Santayana

"My father wanted me to have all the educational opportunities he never had, so he sent me to a girls school." Jack Herbert

"We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk, and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up." Phyllis Diller

"I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed." Bruce Lee

"An encyclopedia is a system for collecting dust in alphabetical order." Mike Barfield

"A lecture is a process by which the notes of the professor become the notes of the students without passing through the minds of either." RK Rathbun

"Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshman bring so much in and the graduates take so little out." Charles Eliot

"The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another." JF Dobie

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts." Henry Adams

"Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it." B. F. Skinner

"Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine." Irwin Edman

"Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes." Norman Douglas

"I had a good education but it never went to my head, somehow. It should be a journey ending up with you at a different place. It didn't take with me. My degree was a kind of inoculation. I got just enough education to make me immune from it for the rest of my life." Alan Bennett

"If a teacher is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind." Kahlil Gibran

"My problems all started with my early education. I went to a school for mentally disturbed teachers." Woody Allen

"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison." Evelyn Waugh

"There's nothing as stupid as an educated man, if you can get him off the thing he was educated in." Will Rogers

"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." John Updike

"Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." Bob Dylan

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

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

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

"School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence." H.L. Mencken

"Schools: vast factories for the manufacture of robots." Robert Lindner

"Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore." Robert Morley

"Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility." Malcolm Muggeridge

"Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school." Ivan Illich "Deschooling Society"

"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:

Confusion.

Class Position.

Indifference.

Emotional Dependency.

Intellectual Dependency.

Provisional Self-Esteem.

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." John Taylor Gatto, speech on accepting 1991 New York State teacher of the year award

"The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community - these are the most vital things education must try to produce." Virginia Gildersleeve

"Do not appear so scholarly, I pray you. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood. Do you think a Greek name gives more weight to your reasons?" Moliere

"Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality." Henry Fielding (1707-1754), English novelist, dramatist

"Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962), British historian

'We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing." Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) U.S. essayist and poet

"Genius is simply childhood recovered at will." Baudelaire

"A masters diploma in self-taught art has to be earned the hard way: there are no short cuts through its unpredictable syllabus, and there is no institutional authority to supervise and review what goes on.... Mature self-taught artists tend to have self-pride as well as visual style, so that one is tempted to equate their artistic competence with their competence at being themselves." Roger Cardinal

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

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education." George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

"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 be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience." Anne Sullivan

"But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school." Saki (H. H. Munro) (1870-1916), Scottish author

"The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done." Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss cognitive psychologist

"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training." Anna Freud

"He who can does. He who can't, teaches." George Bernard Shaw

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards." Mark Twain

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect." Mark Twain

"Education is very important. That's why I never let schooling get in the way of mine." Mark Twain

"One had to cram all of this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy spirit of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. 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

"The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church." Ferdinand Magellan

"Let me listen to me, and not to them." Gertrude Stein

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

"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 Russel

"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving." Russel Green

"There is, on the whole, nothing on Earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school." George Bernard Shaw

"My best teacher was my dog; the world is my classroom." Jane Goodall

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world... Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead

"Now they're talking about making kids where uniforms in school...this is pretty stupid. Don't these schools do enough damage making these kids think alike, now they want them to look alike too?" George Carlin

"Here's a bumper sticker I'd like to see...'We are the Proud Parents of a Child who has resisted his teacher's attempts to bend him to the will of his corporate masters'." George Carlin

"Schools if they must exist - should be HELPING kids learn, not telling them when to learn, how to learn and WHAT to learn. Of course, this is why they rarely tell them why they are learning the way they are, because the answer would be too depressing – because out in the 'real world', this is how things operate, you have little choice. Why? Because not too many people bother to ask that question." Dov Harrison