Lawrence Weschler Quotes

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

I believe primary and secondary education is the bedrock of any sustainable society.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

To know the rules of the game, you have to be educated.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

It's something I've noticed with my two children - children frequently know and don't know at the same time. They are aware of aspects of the world that are a little bit shadowy, and they choose not to engage with them.

It is … interest of all, that every one, from birth, should be well educated.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it .... For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

The savage and women are not what we call intellectual because they are not taught to know and manipulate the materials of knowledge.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

Young people never do have a clue. There are some young people that do, but they've always been the exception. They always all grow up at some point. The problem is that they're all being indoctrinated by stupid leftists.

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school. The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

I grew up going to public school, and they were huge public schools. I went to a school that had 3,200 kids, and I had grade school classes with 40-some kids. Discipline was rigid. Most of the learning was rote. It worked.

I really feel strongly that we don't need to dumb things down for children.

We need to sort the kids out and educate them properly. After all, they are our future.

Kids watch their parents, right? And when kids are three, four, five-years-old, that's when they're like a sponge, and who they are is really developed by the time they are seven.

Can watching video lessons or using interactive software make people smart? No. But I would argue that it can do something even better: create a context in which people can give free rein to their curiosity and natural love of learning so that they realize they're already smart.

State educators have confused the length of formal education with real-life skills.