Robin > Robin's Quotes

“Historically, precollege education has focused on educating for the known, the tried and true, the established canon. This made very good sense in the many periods and places where most children’s lives were likely to be more or less like their parents’ lives. However, wagering that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday does not seem to be a very good bet today. Perhaps we need a different vision of education, a vision that foregrounds educating for the unknown as much as for the known. Perhaps we need a vision of education that’s more “future wise,” reflecting our best guesses about what’s most likely to happen and foregrounding flexible knowledge likely to inform whatever does happen.”
― David Perkins, Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World

“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.”
― John Taylor Gatto

“I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to 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.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling