Jonathan Kozol Quotes

Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful.

Education in France is used to inculcate the values of the state.

The whole idea of a public education was to train young people about how our system of government works, so they could be good citizens and be part of it. We're not doing that today.

We really have to, as a country, recognize that school is where people get their identity not just as a scholar, or a future business person, but as a citizen. And we need to make sure that schools set them up for success as citizens.

For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one.

the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society... The result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.

I love school, and I love learning, and school really does inspire me for a lot of my writing - just being in public school with people and watching things happen.

A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people

Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.

American education will be determined by the quality of American public education, and that's public schools that are available.

[I]t would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools.

A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.’ (1923)

Try not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.

Ministers of the Gospel are excluded [from serving as Visitors of the county Elementary Schools] to avoid jealousy from the other sects, were the public education committed to the ministers of a particular one; and with more reason than in the case of their exclusion from the legislative and executive functions.

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in a working class community. There were no miracles in my life, there's nothing miraculous about how I grew up, and I want people to know when they look at me, to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.

Keep government out of the money of the people, schools of the people, and will of the people.

If we want to produce people who share the values of a democratic culture, they must be taught those values and not be left to acquire them by chance.

When I am emperor, I will abolish private education. Private schools, private college. All of these parents with money and energy and the drive for bake sales and a desire to leave their vast fortunes to education - everybody would have to be eating out of the same educational pot.

Since free men cannot judge for themselves what endangers their freedom if they believe it is never in danger, it is the chief burden of the public school curriculum to persuade children that their liberty is always secure.

The result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.

The mission of a great school is not to cram you with facts so that you can regurgitate them...This gives many boys such a distaste for learning that they never read another book as long as they live. No, the mission is to inspire you with a taste for scholarship - a taste which will last you all your life.

The population has to be educated about how the government actually works.

That should be the goal, is that every kid in every neighborhood, despite whatever challenges they may face, are getting a great education in our public schools.

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.

Every city should make the common school so rich, so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments, and so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be able to live under the drip of it.