More Quotes

Perhaps the great­est of all wrongs we do chil­dren in school is to deprive them of the chance to judge the worth of their own work and thus destroy in them the pow­er to make such judg­ments, or even the belief that they can.
John Holt, The Under­achiev­ing School, p. 60 

We can­not have real learn­ing in school if we think it is our duty and our right to tell chil­dren what they must learn.
John Holt, How Chil­dren Fail, p. 179 

What would hap­pen if every­body start­ed talk­ing about what they know?
Susan Ohan­ian, Silence Ain’t Golden 

There are two main rea­sons that we test chil­dren: The first is to threat­en them into doing what we want done, and the sec­ond is to give us a basis for hand­ing out the rewards and penal­ties on which the edu­ca­tion­al system–like all coer­cive systems–must operate.
John Holt, The Under­achiev­ing School, p. 55. 

Live now as we think human beings should live, in defi­ance of all that is bad around us.
Howard Zinn 

It is some­times said iron­i­cal­ly in Chi­na that indi­vid­u­als are allowed to exper­i­ment — so long as they suc­ceed. Of course, so long as suc­cess is required, gen­uine exper­i­men­ta­tion can­not occur.
Howard Gard­ner, To Open Minds, p. 237 

There is no more obnox­ious way to pun­ish a man than to force him to per­form acts which make no sense to him… This mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of use­less effort is more intol­er­a­ble than fatigue.
Simone de Beau­voir, The Ethics of Ambiguity