Jerry Falwell Quotes

I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!

Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interferes with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.

These day schools did invaluable service in the days of the Colony and Commonwealth, and, indeed, in the early days of the Republic; but to their continuation must undoubtedly be ascribed the tardy recognition of the government and people of the fact that no agency for the education of the masses is as effective as the public school.... There is not one public school building owned by the government or by any city or township.

There is a growing acceptance and interest in publicly funded school choice as a catalyst for education reform in general and a way to empower parents to be education reformers.

Keep the Federal skunk out of our schools.

The problems of public schools will not be solved by cutting off the source of their funding, which is what vouchers are.

The task of educating belongs fundamentally and primarily to the family …. Whenever the state lays claim to an educational monopoly, it oversteps its rights and offends justice.

Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace…. the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.

Restoring prayer ... will scarcely at this date solve the grievous public school problem. Public schools are expensive and massive centers for cultural and ideological brainwashing, at which they are unfortunately far more effective than in teaching the 3 R's or in keeping simple order within the schools. Any plan to begin dismantling the public school monstrosity is met with effective opposition by the teachers' and educators' unions. Truly radical change is needed to shift education from public to unregulated private schooling, religious and secular, as well as home schooling by parents.

I'll continue to fight for school choice and home schooling. Do I believe in accountability? You bet I do.

It's time to update traditional public schools, charter schools, home schools, online schools and parochial schools. Let the dollars follow the child instead of forcing the child to follow the dollars, so that every child has the opportunity to attain an education.

Yes, I believe in school choice. Parents know far better than government bureaucrats what their children need from an education standpoint, and they should be permitted to make that choice.

There is no neutral aid when that aid principally flows to religious institutions nor is there truly “private choice” when the available choices resulting from the program are predominantly religious.

Whatever help the nation can justly afford should be generously given to aid the States in supporting common schools; but it would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of the revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools.

The reasons that parochial schools are generally better than the public schools is that the parochial schools have two things that the public schools do not have: Discipline and Standards.

The movement for the democratic idea inevitably became a movement for publicly conducted and administered schools.

… the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions…. Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.

Public education must be viewed from the lens of providing each child with the learning environment that best meets his or her needs. If we can send a low-income child to a parochial school, knowing that his odds of attending college will increase as a result, then that should be our mission.

As the son of a union activist and a lifelong Democrat, I've always thought that privatizing our public schools is not the answer. We must strengthen public schools.

Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.

The difference between the denominational system and the public school system is all the difference between bolstering them up on the one hand and letting them alone of the other.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

Let's focus on how we can take someone who is being poorly educated in an American public school and how they are poorly trained for a job, and put in place those opportunities for them to get that education, give their parents choice in education, make it real for them.

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

I am and have always been a strong proponent of public education. But by the virtue of its very nature - publicly funded schools cannot offer the type of spiritual education that Catholic schools have long provided.