Isadora Duncan Quotes

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.

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.

Students Are Not Widgets. Schools Are Not Factories.

My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child

I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools. My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

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

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

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.

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children

Good teaching is forever being on the cutting edge of a child's competence.

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.

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages.

Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.

We must destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent.

Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.

I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.

Looking back on a 30-year teaching career full of rewards and prizes, somehow I can't completely believe that I spent my time on earth institutionalized; I can't believe that centralized schooling is allowed to exist at all as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. Did it really happen? Was this my life? God help me.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

The thing we need to work on as a country is our educational system. To me, that is something that our generation needs to be focused on. To make sure that for our next generation, every child - no matter what background, no matter what ethnicity, no matter whether they're whatever gender - that they are all educated to have real equal opportunity. That's number one for me. But I have no question that if it's not our generation that will make sure that that happens that it will be our children's generation.

If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.

I've seen my kids' work at school, and I think they're better than when I was young, 'cause I was brainwashed into anti-Communism. This is a much more interesting view of history than I've ever seen, and I hope to God it works. It's classic history, classically told. No talking heads. Just pure archival footage and a storyline.

Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.