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"Giving a 'lower-class education' can only mean giving no education at all, and this, one would suppose, can be done better on the street than in school. If, for example, it is pointless to try to teach the child correct English, it is pointless to try to teach him English at all. The only system that will not favor the child at the upper end of the class-cultural scale is one that frees the lower-class child from having to go to school at all. All education favors the middle- and upper-class child, because to be middle- or upper-class is to have qualities that make one particularly educable." Edward Banfield   "Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word 'education' has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force." Hannah Arendt   "The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States today is business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor's degrees are awarded in that field. Eight per cent are awarded in education, five per cent in the health professions. By contrast, fewer than four per cent of college graduates major in English, and only two per cent major in history. There are more bachelor's degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which classifies institutions of higher education, no longer uses the concept 'liberal arts' in making its distinctions. This makes the obsession of some critics of American higher education with things like whether Shakespeare is being required of English majors beside the point. The question isn't what the English majors aren't taking; the question is what everyone else isn't taking." Louis Menand   "I was once seated at a dinner table next to an official of the Department of Education involved in education research. I made an impassioned plea for more controlled experiments in education. The official responded by asking, 'Would you want your child to be the subject of an experiment?' At this, my jaw dropped, and I sputtered, 'They do it to my children all the time! They constantly introduce curriculum changes, scheduling changes, and changes in teacher methods. They just don't bother to evaluate whether or not it works.'" Arnold Kling   "The great majority of women will, and should, devote themselves to building and maintaining homes and families. This is a more arduous job than most men dream. Essentially, however, the vocational training most needed by a married woman is a firm liberal education. Her task is only very partially to manage a house and keep the babies' noses blown. It is primarily to foster the intellectual and emotional life of her family and community while avoiding the pitfall of being just an uplifter. To this end she must have and develop, and continue to cultivate, as an integral part of her being, interests and enthusiasms which will infect her children, her neighbors, and even her husband. The balance of mind and heart, the breadth of understanding and interests which are the goals of liberal education are needed by no one more than a mother." Lynn Townsend White   "Most 18th-century political thinkers were dubious that large states could be republics. Shaped by classic republican ideas, they believed that republics had to be grounded in the virtus of their citizens. Only a stern political education would train citizens to overcome their private egotistic passions and act in the name of Reason, for the public good. Such education was problematic in large states, the political thinkers believed. The great revolutions in America and France proved them wrong. It was passion, not its overcoming, that sustained republics: Love of one's country—patriotism—would transcend egotism and make citizens jealous guardians of their nation's interests, as well as of the liberties of their fellow citizens." Gadi Taub   "We notice Roman jewellery and precious metalwork less than their post-Roman equivalents, mainly because we are distracted by a mass of other luxury items that disappeared (or became very scarce) after the end of the empire: marbled and mosaiced private houses, in both town and country; baths with piped water and underfloor heating; a plethora of exotic foods, spices, and wines; as well as immensely expensive items of pure waste, like the animals imported for the sole purpose that they should die in the amphitheatre (ideally taking with them a few unfortunate slave 'huntsmen'). Very wealthy Romans even derived status from their costly libraries and their expensive literary education. This was a world where the display of social superiority could be very subtle—while paying out huge sums of money for the barbarian slaves and exotic beasts, whose slaughter in the amphitheatre was necessary to secure his status, a Roman aristocrat could also lay claim to a philosophical education that set him above such vulgar things." Bryan Ward-Perkins   "The Wisconsin Teachers' Association, like many similar bodies, declared in 1865 that 'children are the property of the state.' This sentiment was even more broadly framed a year later, by O. Hosford, the Michigan Superintendent of Public Instruction. Speaking at the eighth meeting of the National Teachers' Association—precursor to the National Education Association—Hosford proclaimed: Self-protection is the first law of governments as well as of individuals There is also the duty of self development which governments must observe, making themselves strong and effective in their various departments, and this too if need be at the expense of individual preferences or interests. The duties which a citizen owes to the government are prior to any personal or individual claims, and should be so esteemed; for public interest is far superior to private good. As a banner for the expansion of government schooling, the phrase 'public interest' was often a bitter irony. Despite a petition with 100,000 signatures asking to preserve neighborhood control of schools, the mayor of New York signed into law an 1896 bill centralizing the control of education under a single citywide board. Anti-immigrant bias was a major motivation in this case, as in so many others, with a confidential report to the mayor stating that local control of schooling was a dangerous thing in a city 'impregnated with foreign influences.'" Andrew Coulson   "It's easy to talk about how plutocrats have all the political power—but combined, the upper middle classes run everything: every institution, every media outlet. They are the professional class. Second, they can do all kinds of things to secure their position. They can rig the housing market in such a way as to exclude other people from affordable housing. They can rig education by making it incredibly expensive and hard to access, and by pulling all kinds of strings to get their kids in. They can essentially rig two of the most important markets for opportunity, housing and education, in favor of themselves, which means that their kids are likely to inherit an upper middle class position, too." Richard Reeves   "Liberal education is the necessary endeavour to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness." Leo Strauss   "When increased access to higher education was introduced in the U.S. and Britain, it was seen as a great equaliser. But a couple of generations later, researchers tell us that higher education is now a great stratifier. Economists have found that many elite U.S. universities—including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale—take more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than from the bottom 60%. To achieve a position in the top tier of wealth, power and privilege, in short, it helps enormously to start there. 'American meritocracy,' the Yale law professor Daniel Markovits argues, has 'become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations.'" Kwame Anthony Appiah   "I'm not specifically accusing the youth of Russia; it's a universal law—intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn   "Artists and poets belong to the genus I have named 'Mollycoddle'; and in America the Mollycoddle is hardly allowed to breathe. Nowhere on that continent, so far as I have been able to see, is there to be found a class or a clique of men, respected by others and respecting themselves, who also respect not merely art but the artistic calling. Broadly, business is the only respectable pursuit, including under business Politics and Law, which in this country are departments of business. Business holds the place in popular esteem that is held by arms in Germany, by letters in France, by Public Life in England. The man therefore whose bent is towards the arts meets no encouragement; he meets everywhere the reverse. His father, his uncles, his brothers, his cousins, all are in business. Business is the only virile pursuit for people of education and means, who cannot well become chauffeurs. There is, no doubt, the professional career; but that, it is agreed, is adopted only by men of 'no ambition.' Americans believe in education, but they do not believe in educators. There is no money to be made in that profession, and the making of money is the test of character. The born poet or artist is thus handicapped to a point which may easily discourage him from running at all." Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson   "Half of American colleges and universities lose a quarter or more of their freshman class in the first year, according to University of Pennsylvania education professor Robert Zemsky. Many students head for the exit during the first six weeks of classes. Forty percent of college freshmen don't even graduate. But no one holds the colleges responsible for admitting students who are patently unprepared for—and most likely only marginally interested in—college work. 'The priority for many college presidents is getting freshmen in the door and tuition dollars in the bank,' wrote UC Berkeley professor David Kirp in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. 'Nobody gets fired because students are dropping out.'" Heather Mac Donald   "I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence; while I am confident, had they the advantages of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves. One would wonder, indeed, how it should happen that women are conversible at all; since they are only beholden to natural parts, for all their knowledge. Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew or make baubles. They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write their names, or so; and that is the height of a woman's education. And I would but ask any who slight the sex for their understanding, what is a man (a gentleman, I mean) good for, that is taught no more?" Daniel Defoe   "Some say that math reflects 'whiteness,' motivating some school systems to teach 'woke' math. This is described as using a social justice framework to give students a conceptual understanding of the subject. The Minneapolis school system is spending more than $2 million to incorporate 'ethnic, racial and cultural' diversity into its K-5 math curriculum. Oregon's Department of Education has a teachers' training program aimed at 'dismantling racism in mathematics' through 'ethnomathematics.' Requiring students to 'show their work' is alleged to be racist. Proponents say it is white supremacy to expect a student to write out the mathematical process and show the steps taken to arrive at the answer. However, if traditional math is white supremacy, then why do Asians excel in it?" Harold Black   "Two thirds of English boys took long apprenticeships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—impressive in the light of today's unfulfilled ambition to have half of young people in post-school education. Schooling and apprenticeship cost money, and required the prospect of high wages to make them affordable and attractive as investments, even to the poor: one Ealing gardener paid 6d a week to educate his two children—as much as he spent on beer. If there is a literacy threshold for economic development, England had probably passed it by 1700: there was practically universal literacy in high-level commercial occupations and close to universal in occupations where it was functionally valuable." Robert Tombs   "If racists cannot prevent today's minority young people from becoming pilots, the teachers unions can—by denying them a decent education, in schools whose top priorities are iron-clad job security for teachers, and billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions." Thomas Sowell   "Outside of the technical fields—the hard sciences, engineering, and perhaps a few other daunting disciplines—much of what transpires in today's university can be likened to Soviet consumer production at its most bizarre: huge resources are allocated to achieve a most paltry, shoddy result and, when the payoffs deteriorate further, even larger sums are committed and outcomes falsified. Judged by conventional investment standards—maximize returns from scarce resources—the entire project is in shambles. Virtually anyone who has taught at the college level for twenty-five years or more will confirm that the dumbing down of higher education is not a catchy media-invented phrase." Robert Weissberg   "Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North. No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class. Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half." Jason Riley