School proverbs

Page 4

◆ Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.

- Doris Lessing99

◆ You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!

- Bill Watterson99

◆ It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.

- Laurie Halse Anderson99

◆ I'm the girl nobody knows until she commits suicide. Then suddenly everyone had a class with her.

- Tom Leveen99

◆ Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

- Albert Einstein99

◆ You can drag my body to school but my spirit refuses to go.

- Bill Watterson99

◆ I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

- Bill Watterson99

◆ Well my music was different in high school; I was singing about love—you know, things I don't care about anymore.

- Lady Gaga99

◆ Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

- Edmund Burke99

◆ What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education.

- Harold Howe99

◆ Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

- Isaac Asimov99

◆ The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero99

◆ Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

- Jacques Barzun99

◆ The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.

- Tom Bodett99

◆ Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.

- Max Brooks99