Educational Disillusionment Quotes

In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!

The sad fact is that if you love education, revere the life of the mind, care about the pursuit of truth, think young people need to receive wisdom from their elders, and value moral clarity, the university is the last place you would want to send your 18-year-old.

I can't really blame a lot of young sisters and brothers who believe that education has anything to offer them. Because as a matter of fact, it has nothing to offer them. Suppose they do get a high school diploma that is meaningful. What kind of job is awaiting them. The jobs that used to be available to working class people are not there as a result of the de-industrialization of this economy.

I wasn't in the right place at Kentucky, and I don't think I ever would have been comfortable in college.

Pedagogical romances leave the mentor disgruntled, the pupil confused.

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

I am inclined to think that one's education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots.

When new technology in the classroom starts happening, some people get very excited and think of it as a panacea. It attracts very high amounts of money; it raises expectations, and those expectations aren't met.

I tried to go to college in the U.K. a couple of times, but at that point, I think I was a little disillusioned with education. It wasn't giving me what I wanted it to. I needed freedom to create and do the things that I wanted to explore, and it wasn't really doing that: it was still very prescriptive.

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

I dropped out of high school three days into my senior year because I hated it because New York City public school is a mess. I certainly wasn't one for sitting in a classroom. Then I went off to college to North Carolina School of the Arts, then quit that after two years.

I didn't want to go to school, because I wanted to be an artist, and they were never going to teach me art. None of my family had ever done that kind of stuff either.

I did have a love for literature that overpowered my hatred of the people who taught it, and I think because I had no respect for the teachers, their attitude didn't poison the writing that I was discovering for myself.