Pete Holmes Quotes

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

I didn't have a regular school experience and wanted a more abstract way of learning. I started exploring in lots of different creative ways. It gave me the opportunity to travel and play music, so it was good for me.

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.

I've teamed up with one of the headmasters at Eton College, and we're spearheading a kind of 'slow education movement in Britain'. It's based on this idea of moving away from the fast-food approach to learning and going to something deeper, more woolly, harder to measure.

We've been doing this here since 1968, so we have been identified as an example of a free, democratic school, and many professors want to expose their students to our philosophy.

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

There really is a hunger and a demand for something different in higher education.

We must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

Both of my parents are teachers. One is in the Waldorf school system in Louisville, Ky., and the other runs a music school. I grew up with loving, supportive, encouraging parents that let me make my own world, and I wish that for every single child.

I wouldn't wish any specific thing for any specific person - it's none of my business. But the idea that a four-year degree is the only path to worthwhile knowledge is insane. It's insane.

You have to think about what you want to do. There is nothing to say that you should study from the age of 20 to 23. I learnt more on a film set at 17 than in the classroom.

I wasn't a great student. Just give me a school with no grades, and I'll be happy.

I didn't go to university or get a degree, but I hired somebody as a mentor - and that I considered my university education.

I didn't learn a lot from books. I learned a lot from movies.

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.

There's a lot out there for me to learn that isn't in college, so I think it's fine for me if I don't go yet.

I think that school just isn't for everyone. A lot of people don't learn well when they're - have to sit in a place for eight hours. A lot of people learn best lying in their own bed, teaching themselves from books. And I was a bad student. I was a brat. If I was a teacher, I would not have liked myself.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.

My mom and dad decided to homeschool us - I'm one of eight - because they really wanted us to be outside and learn some other fundamentals instead of it being school all day in a classroom.

I went to Bard College, which was a really interesting synthesis of a hippie school and a serious academic institution. It was really the perfect spot for me.

A traditional college education works for many students, but for others, this path isn't the best choice.

I didn't have much of a formal education myself.

Throughout my career, some of my best hires have been people who have bypassed the traditional route of university and learned their skills through apprenticeship schemes or alternative education courses.

I don't thrive in a school or academic environment, I found out. I thrive better in the world outside the small academy because I find it hard to explain what I'm doing.