Standardized Education Quotes

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

The Common Core State Standards are more rigorous standards than the great majority of states had in place previously.

I do not support Common Core because there is absolutely no evidence that a big, centralized bureaucracy makes anything better. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.

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.

We are creating a one size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures, when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently. Paradoxically we're embracing standardized tests just when the economy is eliminating standardized jobs.

Parents and teachers alike are alarmed by this top-down approach to education that wrongly ties education money for states to the adoption of academic standards that do not fully reflect the values of South Carolina.

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

It’s about, when did it make sense to say one size fits everybody? It never ever ever made sense to do that, and yet we’re still selling education the same way we sold it when you and I were in high school.

The discovery I made was that, really, in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn't really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same.

The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all students as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.

The factory model of education is a gargantuan bureaucracy. Some kids are good fits - I wasn't. The system gives you bad grades and tells you you're stupid. You don't think, 'If this kid's not a good fit, it could be the system's fault.'

If I was a state, I would like to see education left to the schools themselves, but I don't want the federal government involved in education. I think that it ends up setting standards that cost you time and money and don't make any difference in education. I want to stop that.

With Michigan's economic future on the line, we can't afford to have our 500 local school districts marching in different directions. Instead, we need a high standards, mandatory curriculum to get all our students on the road to higher education and a good paying job.

Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none.

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

When I was in high school, I didn't feel like I had to pile on the APs in order to look good to colleges. High-achieving classmates didn't use private tutors.

Most of our competitor nations around the world have a national education system and America is the only major nation in the world that operates off of local school boards. They receive very little direction from state boards of education or from the nation. So local school boards direct basically what happens and too often they're not willing to track or to do the supervision of the education system that will make it world competitive.

Interestingly, the British government announced a few weeks ago that they were going to introduce 500 educational targets for preschool children. And teachers complained that “when are the children going to have time to play?” Well, they’re not supposed to play, because play is a right-brain, ad-lib, creative pursuit. The idiot politicians who are introducing it don’t understand this, but the shadow-people from which it is generated certainly do. They want to stimulate the left brain as early as possible.

We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

Our educational system now teaches every kid the same thing. It's like rubber stamping!

What we have done with No Child Left Behind is squeeze the creativity out of the classroom because teachers have begun to just teaching to the test.

Is it not dangerous to have students study together for years, copying the same models and approximately the same path?

In a large country like the United States or India, families differ significantly on their own education values, and I don't believe it is necessary to put everyone through the same curricula and assessments.

The whole reason why we have this kind of assembly line model of education that we inherited from the Prussians, is they were the first people - it's a very egalitarian motive - to say how do we educate everyone.