Megan McCafferty Quotes

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.

If we get public education right, everything else will follow. But if we get it wrong, not much else will matter.

Think about being a teenager and feeling like school is just about taking tests you may or may not be interested in, after which someone will judge whether or not you're smart. No one's going to be inspired by that.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

I knew school was stupid since the fifth grade.

A wise system of education will at last teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.

We really shouldn't be running education like a supermarket where you compare prices.

We have placed more emphasis on grades and school ranking than on genuine education.

Competition has not worked in education because it has never really been tried.

We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over

… while they're adding teachers in places like South Korea, we're laying them off in droves. It's unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.

You know there's a problem [with the education system] when you realize that out of the three R’s, only one begins with an R.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

I want to see myself as a student. Keep learning, keep improving, keep your eyes and ears open.

I'm a good student. Just trying to learn as much as possible is how I picked up so many languages.

I don't want my children to feel the same sense of failure I did growing up because they're not good at passing tests.

If a teacher goes, 'Do you guys want an easy test?' You're going to say, 'Heck, yeah.' The less you've got to study, I'm going ace this test.

I'm half-and-half on school. I had fun in grade school, but when I went to college, it was the worst place I've ever been in my entire life.

From a young age, pupils are put under immense amounts of pressure in high-stakes exams. Often, they're made to feel like their whole future depends on how they perform in these narrowly focussed tests.

People are still programmed to think that if your child doesn't get straight As, get A-levels and go to a Russell Group university, that somehow they are not going to achieve in life. I think that's sad.

No longer can we afford to stuff the brains of the young with facts. The time is too short, the necessity for results too pressing. The new education must be based on the elimination of facts except as they illustrate principles. How to use facts, not how to accumulate them, is the purpose of true education.

Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.