Ai Weiwei Quotes

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.

When I was in Trinity, at least for the first couple of years, I didn't really interact with anyone who wasn't in Trinity. A lot of the years, I lived on campus.

Throughout my entire three years at Sussex I never spoke to another law student. I talked in tutorials but as soon as they finished I was away back to my room to listen to my records.

I spend most of my time by being at a university, hanging out with very manic, excited 18-year-olds.

The beauty of the university world is that you can use it as a microcosm to parody anything in the 'real' world.

I went to public school in L.A., so I felt like I'd been in a coma for three years. I woke up, and moved to New York.

I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That's why I want more technical education in high schools and in community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young people for the jobs of the future.

Physiologically adult humans are not meant to spend an additional 10 years in a school system; their brains map that onto "I have been assigned low tribal status". And so, of course, they plot rebellion - accuse the existing tribal overlords of corruption plot, perhaps to split off their own little tribe in the savanna, not realizing that this is impossible in the Modern World.

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

They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.

I was from my little perch in a prep school I saw the civil rights movement and it was defining the moral dimensions of the time and I was drawn to it and I read James Baldwin and read Invisible Man and these were my touch points. But it was when I got to Michigan and saw a bigger world, a real world, that I got involved.

[The whole first year at university] was a great time for me and great time of awakening.

Among the elementary measures the American government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under a National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of bourgeois ideology.

That's why school was invented - to give your parents some peace and quiet during the day.

I went to school for one year. It was the best experience but the worst experience. The best experience because I was, like, 'Oh, now I know why kids are so depressed.' But it was the worst experience because I was depressed.

When I was a kid I was not a good student. I went to the University of Colarado, my grades were poor. I was asked to leave after a year. What I really wanted to do was to be an artist.

I went to a school that's predominantly computer science and engineering. So, there's a real shortage of hot girls, let's say.

Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.

I went to what is known as, and was at that time, too, Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In fact, because of the lack of public school facilities, I began there. I began boarding school at the high school level; in fact, a year below the high school level.

I saw more stupid people in graduate school and three decades in academia than I ever did who ran 100 acres without going broke.

College had a great deal to do with my development as a person. I don't know if I'd be the artist I was if it wasn't for goin' to school like that. School is a good place - it ain't for everybody, but I think it's for most people.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.

A boy will learn more true wisdom in a public school in a year than by a private education in five. It is not from masters, but from their equals, that youth learn a knowledge of the world.