Jerry Spinelli Quotes

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

You can force students to learn, to a certain extent, but students aren't happy and employers aren't happy.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

Think about being a teenager and feeling like school is just about taking tests you may or may not be interested in, after which someone will judge whether or not you're smart. No one's going to be inspired by that.

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.

There's no true value placed in learning, if the point of you learning something is to simply know it for a test, to get a grade, to go to the good school.

I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school. I like to be taught to read and write and add and then be left alone.

School can become a temple of learning only when the student, the guardian, and the society, in harmony, endeavor to make it a place of pursuit for education, a sadhana; where the spring of punctuality, sanctity and thirst for knowledge flows.

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

But to go to school in a summer morn, O! It drives all joy away; Under a cruel eye outworn, The little ones spend the day In sighing and dismay.

Only the schools’ inefficiency can account for creativity surviving after age 25.

Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement.

And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street!

I learned a lot of good things in my school. I've audited a lot of other schools, and I guess after a while I got a little tired of the acting school atmosphere.

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.

We have always believed that our people can stand on no higher ground than the school ground, or can enter any more hopeful room than the classroom. We blend time and faith and knowledge in our schools - not only to create educated citizens, but also to shape the destiny of this great Republic.

Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

School presents daily exercises in dis-association. It forces unwelcome associations on most of its prisoners. It sets petty, meaningless competitions in motion on a daily basis, pitting potential associates against one another in contests for praise and other worthless prizes.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

Together, we will reclaim America's schools, before ignorance and apathy claim more young lives.