Angela Davis Quotes

Lawless schools produce lawless children.

How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?

Increasingly, poor minority and white youth are being funneled directly from schools into prison.

As the father of six children, I want to know that when my wife or I drop our kids off at school they will be safe from predators, crime and violence.

If there's a single message passed down from each generation of American parents to their children, it is a two-word line: Better Yourself. And if there's a temple of self-betterment in each town, it is the local school. We have worshipped there for some time.

The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

When you go into a college of education you've got aspirations of making a difference in people's lives, of loving children, of working with kids, but none of that is affirmed in your college of education. Then you go working in schools, especially in places like New York City and Chicago that I'm most familiar with, and you find these huge aspirations are beaten out of you in a very systematic way - and still people persevere.

If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our school to protect our children, then call me crazy.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.

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.

If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals.

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

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.

We have always believed that our people can stand on no higher ground than the school ground, or can enter any more hopeful room than the classroom. We blend time and faith and knowledge in our schools - not only to create educated citizens, but also to shape the destiny of this great Republic.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

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.

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

But what is now encompassed by the one word (“school”) are two very different kinds of institutions that, in function, finance and intention, serve entirely different roles. Both are needed for our nation’s governance. But children in one set of schools are educated to be governors; children in the other set of schools are trained for being governed. The former are given the imaginative range to mobilize ideas for economic growth; the latter are provided with the discipline to do the narrow tasks the first group will prescribe.

Schools have never been about getting access to information. That's the job of libraries. Schools and universities have nobler missions as gentle gatekeepers. Their role is to control ideas on the loose and to present the best and noblest ideas to the young.

Our schools are filled with this potential energy, and we need to create an environment for that energy to manifest itself.

American high schools have physically imprisoned young people, stripped them of civil liberties and fed them a diet of p.c. pap.