Noam Chomsky Quotes

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

What about your school? It's defective, it's a pack of useless lies.

It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.

I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.

America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed, or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools-even when they're working as designed-cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.

It's like a laboratory, a micro-society of real life, so it didn't look odd to talk about bureaucracy. In the school, in the class, there are already a lot of children from different ethnic backgrounds so the reality is there. I don't have to shove it in people's face. It's just there and it's normal.

I can assure you that there is no question of us throwing away the tradition of the Grammar Schools.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.

It would also have been helpful to have gone to a Catholic grammar school. The only people who know grammar are those people who went to Catholic grammar school. Those nuns beat it into them.

Schools should be places to learn, not to teach.

From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories.

Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation.

Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.

Public school - where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.

All kids, I think, are creative, but they get it pounded out of them in school.

Any place where you have to deal with many social actors like a school - you have the parents, the Ministry of Education, the school board, and the teachers - you need all kinds of sets and rules. You're trying to foresee anything that can happen and everything becomes really rigid. They don't want to talk about death because they don't want to overwhelm the children, but that has already happened, so you're not going to overwhelm them more.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.