Robert Benchley Quotes

My mother didn't feel very satisfied about the English background that I had received in the public schools in Littleton. So, she insisted that I take a year under the high school level. So, I was in boarding school nine years.

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.

The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

All these children [who did not have music and art classes at school] go out into the world without knowing that there is anything other than what they have. Of course, children do look at TV, but what does it give them?

I very much support financial education in schools.

When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.

I think I'd concentrate on young women - particularly girls at school - and I would try and build into school curriculums much more education about relationships and how girls (and boys) can handle them: stuff about consent and that sort of thing.

Didn't you finish your chemistry in school?" "You closed the school and burnt all the books." "Ah, so I did.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.

When I look back at all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all.

Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them...This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship - a taste which will last you all your life.

She was old too, when she went to school they didn't have history.

She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

I don't know how to be happy - They didn't teach it in my school

He had never been interested in stories at any age, and had never quite understood the basic concept. He'd never read a work of fiction all the way through. He did remember, as a small boy, being really annoyed at the depiction of Hickory Dickory Dock in a rag book of nursery rhymes because the clock in the drawing was completely wrong for the period.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.