Curriculum Control Quotes

The issue here isn't whether every student is brainwashed, it's whether it is appropriate.

The fundamentalists are taking over school boards and making curriculum choices for our young people.

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

The debate about who decides what gets taught is fascinating, albeit excruciating for those who have to defend the schools against bunkum.

I don't believe the federal government should be involved in the creation of standards directly or indirectly, the creation of curriculum or content. It is clearly a state responsibility.

We want government to control business and industry enough to protect us as consumers from being cheated, but we oppose government interference in private enterprise. We want government to ensure standards and equality in education, but many of us balk at the idea of a government-imposed curriculum.

By the very nature of government schooling, the matter of what goes into school textbooks must necessarily be a political matter, to be decided by those I political power.

Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience - what they see, hear, think, and believe - will determine the future course for the nation.

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.

We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials.

Certainly, every student and school ought to have standards and evaluation, but who sets those standards, and who writes the test? Whoever controls the test controls the school.

Parents and teachers alike are alarmed by this top-down approach to education that wrongly ties education money for states to the adoption of academic standards that do not fully reflect the values of South Carolina.

The principle of academic freedom is designed to make sure that powers outside the university, including government and corporations, are not able to control the curriculum or intervene in extra-mural speech.

As long as my sixth graders showed an average improvement of five years, the principal and district pretty much left me alone to create my own curriculum and teach whatever I wanted.

Creationists are possibly gaining more political power. In the U.S., you are constantly hearing stories of school boards harassing teachers and trying to get textbooks banned.

Charter schools are public schools that operate, to a certain extent, outside the system. They have more control over their teachers, curriculum and resources. They also have less money than public schools.

Classrooms cannot and should not be coerced into adopting federal academic standards. That's not just my belief; it's federal law.

No matter how good a public school teacher, he or she will always be required to teach the state's values and the state's perspective on subjects from sex to history and biology.

I think that, I'm sure there are gonna be some teachers who are very entrenched in the system, who are going to buy in to what they're being told, as to what the kids are being fed.

We must not falsely teach American history in our schools. We have a law requiring state textbook oversight to guard against frauds like Zinn, and it was encouraging to find that no Hoosier school district had inflicted his book on its students.

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

One thing I cannot understand - and people are probably going to be upset about this - is why local school boards have control over educational content.

Educators are still spending way too much time trying to control what kids learn, bending the content to their own purposes, hoping beyond hope to change - by using technology - but not change too much.