Russell Baker Quotes

I was told that I had to give grades to the students, which I wasn't particularly interested in doing.

We have placed more emphasis on grades and school ranking than on genuine education.

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

Schoolwork came kind of natural to me, but when I brought home a grade that wasn't up to par, my parents let me know it.

You didn't want to bring home anything but an A or a B. To my mom, a C was like an F.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?

Children, although for the most part under the unwritten discipline of home, are not to be regarded as outside the control of public regulation. For the education of children is a matter of more than private interest; it concerns the State, which indeed regards the right training of the young as, in certain aspects, within its proper sphere. I would wish to see this responsibility extended.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

We've never tried to educate children. We've never tried to preach to them, just entertain.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

Upon our children-how they are taught-rests the fate-or fortune-of tomorrow's world.

Now, the education of our children is of national concern, and if they are not educated properly, it is a national calamity.

The first duty of the educator, whether he is involved with the newborn infant or the older child, is to recognize the human personality of the young being and respect it.

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.

I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.

I can assure you that there is no question of us throwing away the tradition of the Grammar Schools.

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

I trust the time is coming, when the occupation of an instructer [sic] to children will be deemed the most honorable of human employment. If it is a drudgery to teach these little ones, then it is the duty of men to bear a part of that burthen; if it is a privilege and an honor, then we generously invite them to share that honor and privilege with us.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.