Timothy Leary Quotes

What did you learn in school that you still use today? Go ahead teachers, tell me. What? Fear, conformity, don't question authority.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

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.

Schools have not necessarily much to do with education...they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

The supreme lesson of any education should be to think for yourself and to be yourself; absent this attainment, education creates dangerous, stupefying conformity.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

Don't trust anyone who has been in school for the past 24 consecutive years.

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

I think some people like me because I'm different. I don't think like everybody else. People are so tied up in the worst parts of technology these days. They live a life pressing buttons. They don't use their imaginations.

Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!

The temptation to inculcate rather than to educate is understandably strong among long frustrated populations. In many such places, public emotions fluctuate between bitter impatience and indifferent skepticism - and neither impatience nor indifference are favorable atmospheres for encouraging reasoned thought.

Every child needs to become literate in one or more languages, and every child should become comfortable in the major scholarly disciplines - historical, scientific, mathematical, and artistic-humanistic thinking. Beyond that, I am not in favour of a uniform system. I think there should be some choices.

I'm used to being told what to say, but not what to think... that's usually left up to me.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.

Education means to bring out wisdom. Indoctrination means to push in knowledge.