Ivan Illich Quotes

Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with.

I believe the public schools are the greatest cultural influence in this country.

For digital natives, public schools are jails

I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.

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

Nowadays, with history not being taught anymore in American public schools, self-esteem is taking its place.

The single most prevalent form of child abuse in this country is the act of sending a child to a government school. We worry incessantly about the separation of church and state. We would do well to devote half as much attention to the separation of government and education.

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.

From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories.

The private schools and the independent schools like Oprah's are really doing well because they've got the best of everything but it certainly puts the spotlight on a system of public education that is still reeling from the apartheid years [in South Africa].

Praise God for those of you who do homeschool. I can't emphasize enough: Do what you can to get your kids out of public school. If you can't afford to put them in a private Christian school, homeschool. Because they're being poisoned in the public schools. They're being brainwashed in the public schools, with all this secularism, with all this immorality that is being immersed into them on a daily basis.

As long as American liberals are going to keep announcing that they're embarrassed for their country, how about being embarrassed by our public schools or by our ridiculous trial lawyer culture that other countries find laughable?

I attended the public schools.And I have happy memories and strong memories of those days and good memories of the good sense and the decency of my friends and my neighbors.

Just, as I have traveled around from school to school, whether it's project-based learning or an outward bound curriculum, it's very hard to tell the difference between charters and public anymore. There's no fine line.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education.

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.

I think Americans have become a - much more a nation of consumers than citizens.

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions.

Free education for all children in public schools... Combination of education with industrial production

School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.

For decades, the public school system failed too many children, so we passed the No Child Left Behind Act and demanded schools show results in return for money.

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.