Kinky Friedman Quotes

We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

We should have high expectations of our children, but politicians should not tell teachers how to meet them.

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

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.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

Certainly, every student and school ought to have standards and evaluation, but who sets those standards, and who writes the test? Whoever controls the test controls the school.

We've become so accustomed to teaching to the tests that we've forgotten about a child's joy of discovery.

We don't teach kids how to think anymore. We're getting rid of the classics - high school is all about self-esteem.

School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.

We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.

I was genuinely lucky to have the professors I did, many of whom took a very humanist approach in teaching history that went beyond memorizing dates and battles and all of that - basically, looking at the life of individuals throughout history, aided by fascinating primary sources.

Federal government has forced a one-size-fits-all model on our education system.

Education means teaching kids how to do stuff and how to think about stuff. Education is a pretty simple concept with a very clear way to measure results: you give some kind of an exam - maybe it's one of those standardized tests all kids hate, maybe it's some kind of essay, but whatever it is, it'll measure the results, and the kids will hate it.

When I was a young child and before he had left us for the U.S., my father would give me Mark Twain novels. In the characters, the weather and the context, my father must have seen many parallels to his own youth in the Caribbean in the 1930s and 40s.

In a better world, science teachers would teach creationism along with evolution as an exercise in critical thinking.

It amazes me when I talk to people in their early 20s and they've never read the classics, things we read as children. When you don't have knowledge and understanding, then fear rises in you.

If knowledge is power and power is knowledge, then how so many idiots be graduating from college?

The whole concept of higher education is negated unless the sole criterion used to determine if students qualify is the grades they score on standardized tests. Education is purely an issue of learning - we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics. Leave pollution up to the politicians

Schools teach the need to be taught.

Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences.

I want to get rid of Common Core.