Frank McCourt Quotes

Pretty much hated school. I never really found my footing. I just didn't like lessons.

I was a horrible student. I really hated school.

School didn't work for me. I hated it.

I never finished high school. In fact, I hated going to school.

I didn't really enjoy school in general.

We have 200,000 kids a year who drop out of the French school system and have no hope. They become a drag on society.

I just didn't like going to school.

One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.

I hated school. I travelled so much in my early years that I didn't understand the process. I felt suffocated - not like I was some grandiose artist; I just felt like an alien.

In fact, the Harvard study data indicates that 70 percent of African American children attend schools that are predominately African American, about the same level as in 1968 when Dr. King died.

I'm not saying standardized tests are the worst ever, but there's an in-between and I don't think we're there yet. That's what I mean when I say I have an issue with it. There's no way a kid can learn in a class with 40 to 45 people. I had the power to get out of that system and pursue things that I wanted to do and I did that.

I just never did like school.

In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.

I didn't really enjoy school. I wouldn't say they were my golden years.

The sheltering of upper income children in private schools not only accelerates the deterioration of public education, it hides its consequences from precisely those people who could do something about it.

We still have two public school systems in the United States: One for the haves and one for the have-nots.

Public schooling is welfare for the middle class.

The public education system works for children of families like mine but it does not work for the children of families who I represent …

Our youth of today, it is to be feared, is backward to learn; studies are accounted irksome.

Some people say that we will never fix education in America until we fix poverty. I think that they have it exactly wrong. We will never fix poverty until we fix education.

Children don't drop out of high school when they are 16, they do so in the first grade and wait 10 years to make it official.

A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.

I am particularly interested in primary education because the state of affairs in primary education in this country is a cause for concern.

I failed eighth grade twice, and then they moved me up to ninth grade. Then I failed that and dropped out. My teacher would hand me a test, and I'd grade it myself with an F, then put my head down on the desk.

That's why I created the New America School - to fill the cracks in our public education system.