John Amos Comenius Quotes

Today's Schools are not Tomorrows Schools. That's a fundamental misconception.

Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.

Books will soon be obsolete in the schools... Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.

American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.

We need to focus on helping EVERY child to get a world-class education in EVERY school in this country.

The findings in contemporary social sciences are helping us understand that we can find other ways to educate people and act against injustice and corruption in our society.

I support charters, but the right kind of charters. I support charters that support kids who have the highest needs. A charter should be targeting students who are in serious trouble. It should serve students who didn't succeed in public schools when it can help them. Or, at least, charters should agree to accept similar proportions of the kids with the highest needs.

The incredible story of progress that is America has always been built by those who ask why, what if, and why not. Our schools must begin instilling that wonder in our children again so that their generation will unite around the next great project of our time, whether it be declaring America energy independent or launching the next great technological revolution.

Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion - accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption plot, perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

Liberals will not let you improve the schools or the educational opportunities for poor people, because they want to maintain their teachers union status quo.

The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.

The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.

Dr. Arnold . . . the admired reformer of public schools, came across some cranks who thought it a mistake to flog boys. Anyone reading his outburst of furious indignation against this opinion will be forced to the conclusion that he enjoyed inflicting floggings.

All schools both here and in America should teach far fewer subjects far better.

One of the things that even wealthy children need is an education, and I think the problems I saw really have nothing to do with economics. So I was unhappy with what my own children were getting even in the better schools, and then I was seeing so many children here recruited for failure.

We need 21st century programs. We have to change the dynamic because the world - we're not in the Industrial Revolution anymore, where you could leave high school, go work at the town factory for 50 years, and retire with a pension.

I think the universities as we know them will be dead in a future years. I'd like to see them replaced by something better, instead of something worse, and it's not clear which way it will go.

If charter schools are not more successful on average than the public schools they replace, what is accomplished by demolishing public education? What is the rationale for authorizing for-profit charters or charter management organizations with high-paid executives, since their profits and high salaries are paid by taxpayers' dollars?

I just cannot understand why we can't have better schools. That private schools are the only option for the kind of high-net-worth crowd, I think, is ridiculous. It should be a major initiative. It should be something we're all working on. We have to get our head out of the clouds.

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

The role of the federal government, if any, is to create more school choice.

There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.

Real improvement in our schools is not simply a matter of spending more, it is a matter of expecting more.