Bel Kaufman Quotes

Even befor doing this film, I've always been interested in mythology.

I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on.

I'm very at home working with mythology.

Mythology does not interest me. Nor does history. But the possible overlap between history and mythology excites me immensely.

I like mythology - anything historical.

Everything that we used to think got taught at home now seemingly has to be taught in the public school system, and something is going to get lost in the process.

I used to like Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology. All mythology!

I never felt that I belonged. When I was at school... First I went to a Jewish school, when I was very little. But when I was 12, they put me in a school with a lot of traditions, and they were educated people and they were talking about Greece and the Parthenon and I don't know what.

I've always been fascinated by mythology or, in modern parlance, by X-Men or vampires.

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.

I can assure you that there is no question of us throwing away the tradition of the Grammar Schools.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

Because they don't teach the truth about the world, schools have to rely on beating students over the head with propaganda about democracy. If schools were, in reality, democratic, there would be no need to bombard students with platitudes about democracy. They would simply act and behave democratically, and we know this does not happen. The more there is a need to talk about the ideals of democracy, the less democratic the system usually is.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

My father said, "Okay, enough with the Jewish school." He put me into a public school and he said, "If you are the first one in your class, that means the school is bad." That was his humor.

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother.

Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation.