Dave Barry Quotes

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.

We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.

I don't think the Gallup Poll technique is going to be very helpful in determining the goals of our educational system.

Schools are not exam factories for the rat race.

The American idea that everyone graduates high school at 18 is a good one.

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

I went to public school up until junior high.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

It's important that kids learn, but I really don't like all the testing, testing, testing.

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

I'm not a very good advertisement for the American school system.

The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits - I wasn't. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you're stupid. You don't think, 'If this kid's not a good fit, it could be the system's fault.'

When you introduce competition into the public school system, most studies show that schools start to do better when they are competing for students.

Every educated person is a future enemy.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.

When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did.

I'm not saying standardized tests are the worst ever, but there's an in-between and I don't think we're there yet. That's what I mean when I say I have an issue with it. There's no way a kid can learn in a class with 40 to 45 people. I had the power to get out of that system and pursue things that I wanted to do and I did that.

I stood as well as any in my class, but the test of scholarship at that day was contemptible

Certainly, every student and school ought to have standards and evaluation, but who sets those standards, and who writes the test? Whoever controls the test controls the school.

We need to sort the kids out and educate them properly. After all, they are our future.

Because the Advanced Placement Examination test is the required end-of-course examination, it cannot reasonably be viewed as a service or program for which a fee may be levied.

Education standards need to be set at the state level. High standards are an important way to ensure that the education system we are funding is actually working and producing, at a minimum, what we would expect it to.

I'm not dumb, I just wasn't educated.

Education seems to be placing increased emphasis on assessment and tracking, which means parents are terrified that if their kid doesn't exceed their expected learning level at six years old, they are immediately put in the class that ends up working at McDonald's.