Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Smoking cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall, teacher sends you to the Principal's office down the hall.

Any place where you have to deal with many social actors like a school - you have the parents, the Ministry of Education, the school board, and the teachers - you need all kinds of sets and rules. You're trying to foresee anything that can happen and everything becomes really rigid. They don't want to talk about death because they don't want to overwhelm the children, but that has already happened, so you're not going to overwhelm them more.

The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave toward him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability.

I really don't think our school system is an evil borg force. It's sort of like the government. It's not even efficient enough to be a borg of total evil, even if it wanted to be.

I'll tell you what the real problem is: These people are working under the assumption that they know better about what is good for kids, what kids need to learn to get ahead in this world.

The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster.

No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.

Cameras in classrooms are no substitute for greater authority by parents and teachers.

Through the post-war era, including the teachers’ union movement, the authority of the principal has in fact been reduced to a shell.

You know there's a problem [with the education system] when you realize that out of the three R’s, only one begins with an R.

School is not for me. I'm volatile and hate being told what to do.

What does a teacher do in a school? A teacher would tell you off or give you lines or whatever it is, detentions, but at the same times, they are wanting your best interests at heart. They are teaching you, they are educating you, but at the same time, they will also have the ability to sanction you.

The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

What about your school? It's defective, it's a pack of useless lies.

We used to have superb public schools. I guess we don't anymore, but, boy, the public schools were really something and I am a product of those in Indianapolis.

Until the Left took over American public education in the second half of the 20th century, it was generally excellent - look at the high level of eighth-grade exams from early in the 20th century and you will weep. The more money the Left has gotten for education - America now spends more per student than any country in the world - the worse the academic results. And the Left has removed God and dress codes from schools - with socially disastrous results.

It is hard to imagine, but in a Maryland school, a 13- year old girl was arrested for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. There is more at work than stupidity and a flight from responsibility on the part of educators, parents and politicians who maintain these laws, there is also the growing sentiment that young people constitute a threat to adults and that the only way to deal with them is to subject them to mind-crushing punishment.

There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and then go to glory.

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

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

We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools.

It would also have been helpful to have gone to a Catholic grammar school. The only people who know grammar are those people who went to Catholic grammar school. Those nuns beat it into them.

The average schoolmaster is, and always must be, an ass.

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