Michael Gove Quotes

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

The teacher is commodified, the school is a shop, the subjects are consumer goods. To read, to think, to reflect, isn't a question of want, it's a question of need.

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

I give the children education.

To know the rules of the game, you have to be educated.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Teachers and parents who incline toward the authoritarian attitude are scornful of “frills.” They consider lecturing, memorization, recitation, and grading to be the basics, as they remember them from their own school days. They believe in withholding promotion form children who have not satisfactorily completed the year’s work in all subjects, despite the evidence that when children are made to repeat a grade, they do not do as well in the following years as similar children who were promoted. To authoritarians, education is not a means to help each child to mature but a series of hurdles over which everyone, of no matter what capability, must jump. A policy of withholding promotion means ignoring the fundamental and complex question of why the children failed and what needs to be done to correct that problem.

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

I really feel strongly that we don't need to dumb things down for children.

We've never tried to educate children. We've never tried to preach to them, just entertain.

We've become so accustomed to teaching to the tests that we've forgotten about a child's joy of discovery.

If I'm teaching deep things, then I view it as important to make people feel like they're learning deep things, because otherwise, they will still have a hole in their mind for "deep truths" that needs filling, and they will go off and fill their heads with complete nonsense that has been written in a more satisfying style.

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of 'correct thinking.'

Schools teach the need to be taught.

Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.

Kids don't lack capacity, only teachers.

Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?" "Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the students learns?" "What's the difference?" "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?" -Jacen & Vergere