Education Crisis Quotes

The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.

It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't even read.

America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering.

If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.

The student protests of the 1960s were partly the outcome of the hypertrophy of the university and the resulting shortcoming in higher education.

Education will never be raised to a level adequate to the demands of the present form of civilization--it is woefully inadequate now--till international ethical action raises it.

We must question why the smartest students don't choose to become teachers.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous.

I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.

When people talk about people being left behind - middle wages have not gone up for years, and we should recognize that, and there I think we need growth and skills - but there are these other people who have been left behind. When I say out loud, "Fifty percent of inner-city schoolkids do not graduate from high school," that is a national catastrophe. We should be ringing the alarm bells. It's not fair.

We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!

Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

Whether you look at these recent PISA results, which we are mediocre at best, whether you look at a 25 percent dropout rate in this country, whether you look at, in one generation, we're not doing what we need to be doing to keep America great.

The illiteracy level of our children are appalling.

Government school education across India is in shambles.

More than fifty years ago Sputnik dramatically raised the nation's awareness of what was lacking in science and math education in America. What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good.

Michael Gove was one of the worst things to ever happen to the education system in this country. David Cameron is the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.

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.

I have watched as the Government stepped up the process of dismantling the State, throwing thousands of people onto the scrapheap, abolishing job creation and training programs.... I watched them maniacally cutting back programs ranging from industry R&D to family planning to dental hospital services for the poor. I watched this Government create a crisis of confidence in the higher education sector and attack our public school system.

Education in the West, particularly higher education in America, has lost the ability to see the universe from very far away.

The good teachers are bailing out. Education is very important.... This should be the centerpiece on the table of Texas.

Too many children today are trapped in schools that don't work for them.

I think it's a scandal what has been happening in the school system so far as lower income classes. The dropout rates, the illiteracy rate, you know literacy in the United States was a lot higher in 1890 than it is now.

You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.