Public education is the great equalizer of America.
The vast majority of students in this country will continue to attend public schools.
If you want to believe that humans walked with dinosaurs and the planet is a few thousand years old, that is absolutely fine with me. If you want to teach this to your kids, I don't care. If states want to teach creationism in their schools, there is nothing I can do about it, so I don't sweat it.
The path to a better future goes directly through our public schools. I have nothing against private schools, parochial schools and home schooling, and I think that parents with the means and inclination should choose whatever they believe is best for their children. But those choices cannot compete, and cannot come at the expense of what has been -- and what must always be -- the great equalizer in our society, a free and equal public education.
Activists for retrograde social policy live in a world where if you don’t tell teenagers about contraception, they won’t have sex. But that world is not reality, and that fantastical view of human behavior should not dictate sex education policy in ... public schools. Yet it does.
An attack on public education is an attack on democracy.
The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.
I went to public school my entire life.
The way I want to try and end private schools is by making our national education service so good you wouldn't want to waste your money.
Last year I was on Pat Robertson's show, and we discussed our basic Christian faith - for instance, separation of church and state. It's contrary to my beliefs to try to exalt Christianity as having some sort of preferential status in the United States. That violates the Constitution. I'm not in favor of mandatory prayer in school or of using public funds to finance religious education.
Your children will go to public school and they will be trained for somewhere around 15,000 hours in ungodly secular thought. And then they'll go to Sunday school and they'll color a picture of Noah's ark. And you think that's going to stand against the lies that they are being told?
Since free men cannot judge for themselves what endangers their freedom if they believe it is never in danger, it is the chief burden of the public school curriculum to persuade children that their liberty is always secure.
If I'd been born into a hearing family and went to a public school, I would have probably felt much more isolated, and being deaf would have become my identity.
Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful.
A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.’ (1923)
Public schooling is welfare for the middle class.
Public instruction should be the first object of government.
Public schooling fosters our common identity as Americans sharing a land of diversity. It promotes the American ideal of opportunity for all, not just some. It cultivates the civic values of respecting individuals as well as collective responsibility.
While the romanticized ideal of universal public education resonates with the cognoscenti who oppose vouchers, poor urban families just want the best education for their children, who will certainly need it to function in our high-tech and advanced society.
American education will be determined by the quality of American public education, and that's public schools that are available.
I'm a journalist, so my friends are journalists: magazines, newspapers, even public radio. Nobody had their kids in public school.
I went to a catholic public school St Helens and learned English by watching bugs bunny cartoons.
A rich, robust, well-resourced public education is one of the best routes out of poverty and a pathway to prosperity.
Every city should make the common school so rich, so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments, and so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be able to live under the drip of it.
If you are a kid in America, and you live in a secular home and go to public school, you know nothing about Jesus of Nazareth. The only time you hear the word Jesus is when somebody's yelling at you - Jesus, okay?
