Hannah Arendt on totalitarian education

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. 

~ Hannah Arendt, "The origins of totalitarianism," 1966

Robert Frost on education

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

~ Robert Frost, poet

Mark Twain on education

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

~ Mark Twain

(Quoted by Steve Berger, presentation to Mises University, 7:55 mark, August 6, 2008.)

Sidney Poitier on childhood education

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life.  We aren't just what we're taught.  It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain.  We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

~ Sidney Poitier

Doug Casey on public schools

Schools do not teach critical thinking—if indeed they ever did—at least since Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.  Critical thinking is the habit of questioning all assertions and examining everything that we think we know in the light of knowledge, logic, the scientific method, and your own research.  That doesn’t exist anymore in schools.  In fact, the government and the establishment don’t want schools to turn out critical thinkers and free thinkers.  To the contrary, they want obedient, indoctrinated serfs who will do as they’re told and act as cogs in the wheel.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey Reveals 3 Ways You Can Opt-Out of the Rising Insanity," Doug Casey's International Man, October 4, 2021

Carl Sagan on science and skepticism

Science is more than a body of knowledge.  It's a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.  If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan - political or religious - who comes ambling along.

It's a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on.  It wasn't enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in a Constitution or Bill of Rights.  The people had to be educated and they had to practice their skepticism and their education, otherwise we don't run the government; the government runs us.

~ Carl Sagan, interview with Charlie Rose, 3:00 mark, May 27, 1996

Thomas Sowell on dis-education and decline

Ours may be the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children.  In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

~ Thomas Sowell

Jim Rohn on education

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

~ Jim Rohn, motivational speaker

Donna Hearne on the roots of federally-funded education

These revolutionary educational movers, movements, and ideas coalesced in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson created and passed, as a part of the "war on poverty," the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  For the first time, education became an official federal program, even though it was not one of the legal areas for federal involvement specified in the Constitution.  This law cleverly authorized federally-funded education programs, administered by the states, effectively shifting decision-making from the local to the federal.  In 2002, Congress amended ESEA and reauthorized it as the No Child Left Behind Act.  Social justice planners were delighted and went to work.

~ Donna H. Hearne, The Long War & Common Core, p. 4

Thomas Jefferson on education and newspapers

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Paul Craig Roberts on the tragedy of American education

What we are dealing with is not only the brainwashing of white students as to the evil origin of their country and their inherited guilt, but also their inability to think rationally and to make an objective conclusion from evidence. This was once the purpose of education, but no more. Today students are taught that their emotions are what is true, and their emotions are manipulated by the lies that they are taught. 

This perversity of education spells the end of the United States. The kind of people American education is producing are not capable of scientific thinking. The kind of education Americans receive today cannot produce scientists or engineers. We have the emotive generation, people trained to be guided by emotion. 

The inability of American education to produce people capable of thought is already our reality. We see it in the huge number of work visas in which foreigners, largely from Asia, are brought into the US to do the jobs American educated youth cannot do.

~ Paul Craig Roberts, "What is a Fatal Dose of Fentanly?," LewRockwell.com, July 10, 2020

G.K. Chesterton on compulsory education

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

~ G.K. Chesterton

John Stuart Mill on public schooling

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government - whether this be a monarch, priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation - in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 177

Thomas Sowell on educating the younger generation

We're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional. And they are being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about. It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint and more important, to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. 

~ Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institute interview, 7:50 mark, posted on YouTube September 18, 2020

Paul Craig Roberts on the state of education and critical thinking in America

What we are dealing with is not only the brainwashing of white students as to the evil origin of their country and their inherited guilt, but also their inability to think rationally and to make an objective conclusion from evidence. This was once the purpose of education, but no more. Today students are taught that their emotions are what is true, and their emotions are manipulated by the lies that they are taught.

This perversity of education spells the end of the United States. The kind of people American education is producing are not capable of scientific thinking. The kind of education Americans receive today cannot produce scientists or engineers. We have the emotive generation, people trained to be guided by emotion.

~ Paul Craig Roberts, "What is a Fatal Dose of Fentanyl?," LewRockwell.com, July 10, 2020

Atilla Mert Sulker: "Colleges have become feel-good consortiums of the insecure"

College has become an embedded element in the rhythm of the American way of life. Society at large acts like everyone must go to college. Put bluntly, there are plenty of nimrods I see every day, who’d be far better off going to trade school or something of that nature.

I see college as a “choose your adventure” with two choices: 1.) Go to college to become well versed in a skill that you want to leverage (what I am doing via studying engineering); 2.) Go to college to go after an academic career, in which you pursue the truth – above all other things – and do so via rigorous and unabashed debate.

But we don’t see rigorous and unabashed debate anymore. The fact that so many people have forgotten the place of the American college in the societal fabric, as described earlier, has led to an indifference that has allowed one side to seize the debate stage. Its consequences have been catastrophic. Colleges have become feel-good consortiums of the insecure.

~ Atilla Mert Sulker, "In Defense of Walter Block - Bulwark Against Leftist Academic Takeover," LewRockwell.com, June 29, 2020

Allan Stevo on news and confirmation bias

There’s an aspect of confirmation bias that marketers have long understood as significant: the more education you have, the more successful you’ve been inside a system, the less likely you are to see contradictory information from unfamiliar sources as valid. Also, the less likely you are to approach the ideas presented to you by a trusted source in a circumspect fashion.

Basically, if you’ve got a PhD, you eat most of what’s fed to you, as long as it’s fed to you by the right people.

And the news doesn’t just have a way of getting people opinionated, it has a way of making one feel educated, almost expert on a topic.

~ Allan Stevo, "Suddenly Everyone is a Coronavirus Expert," LewRockwell.com, March 13, 2020

Hannah Arendt on the aim of "totalitarian education"

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

~ Hannah Arendt

Bertrand Russell on the difference between ignorance and stupidity

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

~ Bertrand Russell

Albert Einstein on learning facts vs. learning to think

Education is not learning the facts, but training the mind to think.

~ Albert Einstein