Educational Decline Quotes

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup

When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it's all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum.

Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.

I know what falling off the cliff means. I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.

Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.

With Yeltsin, the Soviet Union broke apart, the country was totally mismanaged, the constitution was not respected by the regions of Russia. The army, education and health systems collapsed. People in the West quietly applauded, dancing with and around Yeltsin. I conclude therefore that we should not pay too much attention to what the West is saying.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.

Michael Gove was one of the worst things to ever happen to the education system in this country. David Cameron is the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.

So completely had learning decayed in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could apprehend their services in English or even translate a letter from Latin to English... There were so few of them that I cannot recollect a single one South of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom.

You've got close to educational meltdown here [in Chicago].

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

This nation has been drifting back in comparison with the rest of the world for the last 20 years in education.

The laissez-faire attitude to science education has resulted in a disaster exemplified by the fact that more young people are opting for media studies than physics.

I feel sorry for kids nowadays, because in the majority of schools across the country, the arts have been eliminated from the curriculum. There's no art; there's no music. In some cases they've taken away the libraries. They don't do theater. And these are the things that speak to the human soul.

Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.

Twenty years ago we had the highest percentage of college graduates in the world. Today we are number 11.

Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.

The Left is doing to America what it has done to almost everything it has deeply influenced - the arts, the university, religion, culture, minorities, Europe: ruining it.

There was a time in the mid-1950s when the Philippines was in the same league as Japan economically and academically. Fifty years down the road, and we are almost dead last in the ASEAN region.

In our country, learned ignorance is on the rise.

The politics of religion pursued in a large number of societies called Muslim make too many concessions to the forces of traditionalism, while favoring the adoption of all the benefits of material civilization. This results in dangerous mental cleavages, increasing backwardness in the systems of education, fruitless self-censorship, and the impoverishment of creativity in various domains of intellectual and cultural life.

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.