“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." ~ Morpheus [The Matrix]
This is exactly why John Holt quit teaching and founded the Unschooling movement and John Taylor Gatto came to the same conclusion, both have written multiple books about Unschooling and the failure of schooling.
“A MESSAGE TO TEACHERS
Most of the kids, whom you so patronizingly teach, wouldn’t be there if they weren’t being forced. Despite your fake compassion, and your superior adultist beliefs and rationalizations, it’s NOT OKAY to enslave another human being! It’s REALLY NOT OKAY!!!” ~ HeartyHuman
“If you’re a ‘nice’ teacher, and you’re not 100% clear that most of your students are in your room by force, under threat of punishment, up to and including the use of police power, you’re gaslighting them. You can only freely choose what you’re free to walk away from.” ~ Carol Black
“Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach.”
"Those who can’t “teach,” “administrate.”
“Their schooling made it so schooling was all they know.” ~ Unschooling.com
“Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde
“All learning is in the learner, not the teacher.” ~ Plato
“When the masters stop teaching, the students will finally be able to learn.” ~ Charles de Montesquieu, [French philosopher, 1689 - 1755]
“No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.” ~ Plato
“Learning is not a product of teaching. Kids are born learning. They learn how to walk, how to talk. They’re basically little scientists. If we don’t stop that process, it will continue.” ~ Grace Llewellyn
“Don’t question your ability to teach your child. Question putting your child into the same institution that left you questioning your ability to teach your child.”
“Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?” ~ John Taylor Gatto
“The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape.” ~ John Holt
"Learning is pulling in knowledge that a child finds useful.
Teaching is pushing towards a child knowledge that the teacher wants the child to have." ~ Joyce Fetteroll
“It’s hard for a child to think clearly or constructively when someone is questioning, blaming, or advising her.” ~ Adele Faber
“The truth is that the only education is self-education. Teachers can impart information and make suggestions, but they are like sign-posts … A sign-post is of no earthly use unless the person who consults it wants to go somewhere.” ~ Robert Shafer (1921)
“Learning occurs naturally, but teaching isn’t natural at all. The little ones are learning from the older children or from the adults, but nobody’s teaching. They’re learning on their own initiative, which is so powerful. You don’t have to augment it. In fact, you can’t really augment it. There’s no way you can make a child learn better than he would if he or she wants to.” ~ Jean Leidloff
“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 Bodett
“In times of change the learner inherits the world, while the scholar is wonderfully equipped for a world that no longer exists.” ~ Eric Hoffer, [American writer, 1902 – 1983)
“The reason there’s so much ignorance is that those who have it are so eager to share it.” ~ Frank A. Clark
“We have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know.” ~ Richard Feynman
“If you love it, you’ll teach yourself. If you don’t love it, others will teach you.” ~ Yukitaka Yamaguchi [Tuna King, Japan]
“You can’t really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.” ~ Dave Cullen
“Your best teacher is your last mistake.” ~ Ralph Nader
“If a single teacher can’t teach all the subjects, then how can you expect a single student to learn all the subjects?”
“Maybe you’ve noticed what I’ve noticed, and thought it strange, or dismissed it as youthful foolishness or that you were missing some critical piece of information that would reveal itself with age and wisdom – that is: every single teacher believes feverishly in the importance of the content of their class, and furthermore, believes that their assessment of you in their class is a direct measure of your capacity for future success, while simultaneously not having a clue as to the content of virtually any other discipline in the school. They will boldly state things like, That’s math, I’m an English teacher or That’s literature, I’m a biology teacher, practically admitting out loud that nothing learned in school is important (except, of course, the course they are teaching).” ~ Brian Huskie, [A White Rose: A Soldier’s Story of Love, War, and School]
“People are starting to realize that public education in America was designed for the masses of poor, and its intent has been to trap poor people into being workers and servants. If you don’t want that for your children, then you look for something else” ~ Nikita Bush (Former public school teacher)
“Schools exist for education of children. Not to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, guaranteed market for teaching degrees or captive audience for indoctrinators.”
Sadly, the latter is the reason schools exist. ~ Thomas Sowell
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ~ Stanley Kubrik
“We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.” ~ Galileo Galilei
“Instead of teaching children to get ‘there’, why not let them be here? Where is ‘there’ anyway? The world needs more ‘here’ than ‘there’.” ~ Vince Gowmon
“Never take advice from someone you wouldn’t trade places with.” ~ Kelly Clarkson
“My teachers could have been Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.” ~ Natalie Goldberg
“Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer.” ~ Isaac Asimov
“It is difficult to get people to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it.” ~ Upton Sinclair
“An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.” ~ Nicholas Butler
“What was educationally significant and hard to measure has been replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure. So now we measure how well we taught what isn’t worth learning.” ~ Arthur Costa [Emeritus Professor at California State University]
“Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don’t know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.” ~ Thomas Sowell
“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. ” ~ Shunryu Suzuki
“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.” ~ Bill Bullard
“When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” ~ Jean Piaget
“A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.” ~ Bruce Lee
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” ~ Mark Van Doren
“The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.” ~ H. L. Mencken
“There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“If we don’t model what we teach, we are teaching something else.” ~ Abraham Maslow
“If you’re a ‘nice’ teacher, and you’re not 100% clear that most of your students are in your room by force, under threat of punishment, up to and including the use of police power, you’re gaslighting them. You can only freely choose what you’re free to walk away from.” ~ Carol Black
“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler
“My job is not to teach at all, but to find the opportunities for my kids to learn. NOT knowing something can be an advantage, as it reminds me of the wealth of resources out there in the community and world, if only we are willing to go look for them.” ~ David Albert
“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.” - George Bernard Shaw
“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.” ~ Bertrand Russell
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.” ~ Bill Beattie
“One of my early memories of school is wondering when they were going to start teaching me the things I didn’t know, rather than what I already knew. Many years later, I began to understand how, insidiously, school had reinforced my inadequacies and had left me with what I now call ‘learned incompetency’ and a fear of not being able to do things ‘right’ the first time.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz
“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience.” ~ Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller’s mentor and friend)
“Break the teacher certification monopoly so anyone with something valuable to teach can teach it. Nothing is more important than this.” ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek, [99 Question and Answers About Unschooling: The World Is Your Child’s Classroom]
Teacher Certifications are Unnecessary
“It would be giving too dangerous a power to governments, were they allowed to exclude any one from professions, even from the profession of teacher, for alleged deficiency of qualifications: and I think, with Wilhelm von Humboldt, that degrees, or other public certificates of scientific or professional acquirements, should be given to all who present themselves for examination, and stand the test; but that such certificates should confer no advantage over competitors, other than the weight which may be attached to their testimony by public opinion.” ~ John Stuart Mill, [On Liberty, 1859]
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