Cory Doctorow Quotes

There's no question in my mind of the value in technology in fueling young minds. Like any other tool, if you simply throw it in the classroom and don't consider how best to take advantage of that tool, and you try the old ways with a new piece of technology on the desk, it's no panacea.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.

The last time I saw African kids this excited, Madonna was at their school with a net.

My act is very educational. I heard a man leaving the other night saying, 'Well that taught me a lesson.'

I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

My cousin is gay, in school while other kids were dissecting frog, he was opening flies.

School is a place were you go to eat your lunch

I don't really know. I think the first test is when you're very little and you fart, and you laugh at it and so do your friends and family. I knew before I was funny I was very annoying so I have that covered. I think it was because I was not very good in school I used humor as a defense mechanism. When I started doing plays and stuff at school I decided that I was going to keep doing it until someone tells me to stop and get a real job.

Education is the only business still debating the usefulness of technology.

Wouldn't it have been weird to go to high school with the Pope? You know, somebody did, someone's sitting at home, watching TV in Poland, they see the Pope, they think, "That guy was a jerk! He was so mean to me and now he's Pope? I got a swirly from the Pope!"

People for the American Way says it has yet to find anyone who has made a stronger case against the proposed school prayer Constitutional amendment... What kind of prayer would we use?

Music is important. It says things you heart can't say any other way, and in a language everyone speaks. Music crosses borders, turns smiles into frowns, and vice versa. These observations are shared with a hope: that, when schools cut back on music classes, they really think about what they're doing - and don't take music for granted.

My mom was my English teacher in high school. So to be able to bend the rules and be the class clown and get to take on my religion, my mom, and my town all at the same time was glorious. I think the desire to be funny was a mixture of wanting to be liked but also wanting to throw your elbows a bit. If you're cracking a joke in school, it's sort of anti-authority, but it's in the nicest, "Please like me!" way.

Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.

Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far.

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Flying from the United States to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.

I have always loved music; whoso has skill in this art, is of a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music, or I would not regard him; neither should we ordain young men as preachers, unless they have been well exercised in music

It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.

In high school, when I played football I got no respect. I shared a locker with a mop.

I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.

I might not have been President if it hadn't been for school music. Learning improves in school environments where there are comprehensive music programs.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow.

Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.