Tom Paulin Quotes

I'm a big fan of regular school and regular education. I just learn better in a classroom where I can talk to other students. I want to go to prom and dances and have that social aspect.

I think laptops should be banned from schools. Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing.

My father was a schoolteacher, and so I had the advantage of both western educational instruction in the school, as well as what you might call the process of imbibing the traditional processes of education instruction around me.

Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

The British system had requirements, including Latin. I'm not positive you ever had to know Greek, but there are certainly kinds of curricula where you had to know Greek too. I think in Britain there was the most mindless, repetitive sort of learning.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.

It's not the most intellectual job in the world, but I do have to know the letters.

It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket--and not a few of them are really so ignorant, that they are unable to answer a person correctly, general questions in geography, and to hear them read, would only be to disgust a man who has a taste for reading; which, to do well as trifling as it may appear to some, (to the ignorant in particular) is a great part of learning. Some few of them, may make out to scribble tolerably well, over a half sheet of paper, which I believe has hitherto been a powerful obstacle in our way, to keep us from acquiring knowledge. An ignorant father, who knows no more than what nature has taught him, together with what little he acquires by the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to write a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his father or mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in point of literature, than himself, extolling his learning, struts about, in the full assurance, that his attainments in literature are sufficient to take him through the world, when, in fact, he has scarcely any learning at all!!!!

No child should graduate from high school with a diploma he or she can’t read.

Illiteracy must be banished from the land.

I've gone to real school my whole life.

I think if a youngster leaves school unable to read you're kind of condemning them to a life of poverty and a life of lack of potential.

We need to add to the three R's, namely Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic, a fourth--- RESPONSIBILITY.

Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book.

Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.

I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

He who cannot read is worse than deaf and blind, is yet but half alive, is still-born.

The way to improve our schools is not more money, but the reintroduction of moral and spiritual values, as well as the four R's: reading, 'riting, 'rithmatic, and Rush.

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

If you are a man of learning, read something classic, a history of the human struggle and don't settle for mediocre verse.