Derrick Jensen Quotes

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of 'success' as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, 'schooling,' but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prison.

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

I educated myself. To me, school was boring.

You have to think about what you want to do. There is nothing to say that you should study from the age of 20 to 23. I learnt more on a film set at 17 than in the classroom.

I wasn't a great student. Just give me a school with no grades, and I'll be happy.

There's a lot out there for me to learn that isn't in college, so I think it's fine for me if I don't go yet.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

Ashok Mehta did not go to any institute. He did not carry the baggage of formal education.

I didn't have much of a formal education myself.

Don't get me wrong: school is good and all, but school is way too slow for me. Like, super slow. So I didn't want to go. I wanted to learn on my own with real life experiences.

I educate myself, but I haven't got the time or patience to enlist myself in a degree course. The world is my school.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn't worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave.

If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It’s not about making learning happen; it’s about letting it happen.

I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.

I don't think college is for everyone. School is awesome, but for me, I was learning a lot more outside the classroom in the real world than I was in school.

I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know.

People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten.

I never got a degree; I just started writing.

There really is a hunger and a demand for something different in higher education.