[{"name":"Socrates (via Plato)","dates":"c. 470–399 BC","occupation":"Athenian philosopher","criticised":["credentialism","institutional authority","other"],"summary":"In Plato's Apology Socrates denies ever having been anyone's teacher or taken fees, contrasting himself with the paid Sophists; in the Meno he argues that if virtue were teachable there would be teachers of it, and none can be found. His target is paid, credential-bearing instruction that claims to transmit wisdom, not learning itself.","quote":"As little foundation is there for the report that I am a teacher, and take money; this accusation has no more truth in it than the other.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1656/pg1656.txt","https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1643/pg1643.txt"],"notes":"No universities existed; he founded no school (Plato founded the Academy after his death). Everything is Plato's Socrates. He spent his life teaching in all but name, which is the joke."},{"name":"Seneca the Younger","dates":"c. 4 BC–AD 65","occupation":"Stoic philosopher, statesman, tutor to Nero","criticised":["learning separated from doing","other"],"summary":"Epistle 106 ends by complaining that philosophy has been turned into hair-splitting exercises, closing with 'non vitae sed scholae discimus': we study for the lecture-room, not for life. He is attacking scholastic display inside philosophy, not education as such.","quote":"we learn our lessons, not for life, but for the lecture room","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger"],"notes":"The line is often inverted into the motto 'non scholae sed vitae discimus', which is the opposite of what he wrote. Educated by Stoic teachers and himself tutor to an emperor."},{"name":"Michel de Montaigne","dates":"1533–1592","occupation":"Essayist, magistrate, mayor of Bordeaux","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority"],"summary":"In 'Of the Education of Children' he attacks pedagogues who pour knowledge into pupils' ears and demand it back by heart, insisting the tutor make the pupil test everything and accept nothing on authority.","quote":"Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne"],"notes":"Raised speaking Latin as a first language, finished the Collège de Guyenne by thirteen, then studied law. His essay is advice for a nobleman's son with a private tutor, not a plan for public schools."},{"name":"John Locke","dates":"1632–1704","occupation":"Philosopher, physician","criticised":["rote instruction","standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) argues that a gentleman's son is better off with a tutor at home than in a 'mix'd herd of boys', that beating Latin into children is counterproductive, and that learning should be made 'a play and recreation'. He was disparaging the grammar-school method, not learning.","quote":"of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://archive.org/stream/somethoughtsconc00lockuoft/somethoughtsconc00lockuoft_djvu.txt","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Thoughts_Concerning_Education"],"notes":"Westminster School, then Christ Church Oxford, where he lectured in Greek and rhetoric while finding the scholastic curriculum irritating. The book is written for the sons of gentlemen; it says nothing about universal schooling."},{"name":"Benjamin Franklin","dates":"1706–1790","occupation":"Printer, scientist, statesman","criticised":["credentialism","universities","standardised curricula"],"summary":"At sixteen, as 'Silence Dogood', he satirised Harvard as a Temple of Learning whose porters admit only the rich and whose graduates return 'as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited'. Thirty years later he founded the Academy of Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania.","quote":"they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Silence_Dogood,_No._4","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin"],"notes":"Formal schooling ended at ten. Founded the Junto, the Library Company, and a university, and collected honorary degrees."},{"name":"Jean-Jacques Rousseau","dates":"1712–1778","occupation":"Philosopher, composer","criticised":["rote instruction","childhood conformity","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"Émile (1762) proposes a 'negative education': the child is kept away from books and verbal lessons, learns from things and consequences, and is not taught abstractions before readiness. Yet in the Discourse on Political Economy and Considerations on the Government of Poland he recommends public, state-run education to form patriotic citizens.","quote":null,"quote_status":"none","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":false,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education","https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rousseau/"],"notes":"No formal schooling; apprenticed to an engraver. Deposited all five of his own children at the Paris foundling hospital."},{"name":"Thomas Jefferson","dates":"1743–1826","occupation":"Statesman, third US president, founder of the University of Virginia","criticised":["compulsory schooling","standardised curricula"],"summary":"His 1779 Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge proposed three years of free tax-funded schooling for all free children; his 1817 note on the Elementary School Act explicitly opposed compelling attendance against a parent's will. The University of Virginia he designed had no compulsory curriculum and no chair of theology.","quote":"It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_education"],"notes":"William & Mary 1760–62. Free schooling yes, compulsion no, and a slaveholder throughout."},{"name":"Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi","dates":"1746–1827","occupation":"Educator, founder of schools at Neuhof, Stans, Burgdorf, Yverdon","criticised":["rote instruction","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"Rejected catechism drilling and verbalism, wanting instruction built from sense-perception and engaging 'head, heart and hand'. He wanted universal popular education, and most of his own schools failed financially.","quote":"The ultimate end of education is not a perfection in the accomplishments of the school, but fitness for life","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_Pestalozzi"],"notes":"His critique is of method and the exclusion of the poor, never of schooling itself."},{"name":"William Godwin","dates":"1756–1836","occupation":"Philosopher, novelist, children's publisher","criticised":["institutional authority","standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"Political Justice (1793) argues that a state system of education would ally schooling with government and be used to perpetuate existing institutions and opinions; teach children 'neither creeds nor catechisms'. He nonetheless ran a children's bookshop and wrote primers.","quote":"Refer them to reading, to conversation, to meditation; but teach them neither creeds nor catechisms, neither moral nor political","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://iep.utm.edu/godwin/","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enquiry_Concerning_Political_Justice"],"notes":"Hoxton dissenting academy, not a university. Married to Wollstonecraft, who argued the opposite."},{"name":"William Blake","dates":"1757–1827","occupation":"Poet, painter, engraver","criticised":["childhood conformity","institutional authority","rote instruction"],"summary":"'The School Boy' sets a summer morning against a schoolroom 'under a cruel eye outworn' and asks how a bird born for joy can sit in a cage and sing. His annotations to Reynolds reject academic generalisation in art.","quote":"How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":false,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_Boy"],"notes":"Left school at ten, drawing school, seven-year engraving apprenticeship, briefly a Royal Academy student whose president he despised."},{"name":"Mary Wollstonecraft","dates":"1759–1797","occupation":"Writer, philosopher, schoolmistress","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority","other"],"summary":"Chapter XII of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) attacks boarding schools, purely domestic education, and the 'parrot-like prattle' of children taught to recite what they do not understand, and demands free national day schools where 'boys and girls, the rich and poor, should meet together'.","quote":"the parent who really puts his own hand to the plow, will always, in some degree be disappointed, till education becomes a grand national concern","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wollstonecraft-mary/1792/vindication-rights-woman/ch12.htm"],"notes":"Self-taught; ran a school at Newington Green. She wanted more state schooling, not less, and co-education a century and a half early."},{"name":"Samuel Taylor Coleridge","dates":"1772–1834","occupation":"Poet, critic, lecturer","criticised":["rote instruction","other"],"summary":"Lectured on education at the Royal Institution in 1808 against mechanical instruction while remaining a supporter of Bell's monitorial system; in Church and State he proposed a national 'clerisy' charged with educating the whole populace. In Biographia Literaria he credits a very severe schoolmaster with everything.","quote":"I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6081/pg6081.txt"],"notes":"Christ's Hospital under Boyer; Jesus College Cambridge, left without a degree after enlisting as a dragoon under a false name."},{"name":"Friedrich Fröbel","dates":"1782–1852","occupation":"Educator, inventor of the kindergarten","criticised":["childhood conformity","rote instruction"],"summary":"Founded the Play and Activity Institute at Bad Blankenburg in 1837 and named it kindergarten in 1840, replacing premature formal drilling of small children with guided play. Prussia banned Fröbel kindergartens in 1851 as atheistic and socialist.","quote":null,"quote_status":"dubious","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Fröbel"],"notes":"The popular 'Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood' could not be located in the Hailmann translation of The Education of Man; Hailmann has 'Play is the purest, most spiritual activity of man at this stage'."},{"name":"Michael Faraday","dates":"1791–1867","occupation":"Experimental scientist, Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution","criticised":["other","rote instruction"],"summary":"In 'Observations on Mental Education' (1854) he complained that 'mankind is willing to leave the faculties which relate to judgment almost entirely uneducated' and that useful education of judgment must be self-education. Bookbinder's apprentice who learned from the books he bound.","quote":"mankind is willing to leave the faculties which relate to judgment almost entirely uneducated","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Experimental_Researches_in_Chemistry_and_Physics/Lecture_on_mental_education"],"notes":"Rudimentary schooling only. Spent his life teaching (Friday Evening Discourses, nineteen Christmas Lecture series for children) at an institution that was not a university."},{"name":"Ralph Waldo Emerson","dates":"1803–1882","occupation":"Essayist, lecturer, former minister","criticised":["universities","rote instruction","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"'The American Scholar' (Harvard, 1837) warns that 'Meek young men grow up in libraries' believing their duty is to accept the views in books, and tells colleges they serve only 'when they aim not to drill, but to create'. Delivered at Harvard, by a Harvard man, to Harvard.","quote":"can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar"],"notes":"The quoted words are a fragment of a sentence that begins by granting colleges 'their indispensable office,—to teach elements'."},{"name":"John Stuart Mill","dates":"1806–1873","occupation":"Philosopher, economist, MP","criticised":["standardised curricula","institutional authority"],"summary":"On Liberty holds that the state should require every child to be educated, and enforce this by public examinations, but should not itself supply the education, because a general state education is 'a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another'. His own hothouse home schooling he blamed for his breakdown at twenty.","quote":"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill"],"notes":"Greek at three; never attended school or university. Compulsory education and examinations yes; state monopoly of provision no."},{"name":"Charles Darwin","dates":"1809–1882","occupation":"Naturalist","criticised":["standardised curricula","rote instruction","universities"],"summary":"His Autobiography says 'Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler's school, as it was strictly classical', that Edinburgh's lectures were 'intolerably dull', and that at Cambridge his time 'was wasted, as far as the academical studies were concerned'; what mattered was beetles and his friendship with Professor Henslow.","quote":"Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler's school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2010/pg2010.txt"],"notes":"The Beagle berth came through Henslow, a Cambridge professor; the university he says wasted his time supplied his career."},{"name":"Charles Dickens","dates":"1812–1870","occupation":"Novelist","criticised":["rote instruction","childhood conformity","standardised curricula"],"summary":"Hard Times (1854) opens with Gradgrind demanding 'nothing but Facts' and Sissy Jupe failing to define a horse she has lived with. Dickens campaigned for the Ragged Schools and for more schooling, not less.","quote":"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel)"],"notes":"His enemy is a particular utilitarian pedagogy and brutal proprietors, not education."},{"name":"Henry David Thoreau","dates":"1817–1862","occupation":"Writer, naturalist, surveyor, schoolteacher","criticised":["learning separated from doing","credentialism","childhood conformity"],"summary":"Walden mocks a college that certified him in navigation when 'one turn down the harbor' would have taught him more, and asks how youths could better learn to live 'than by at once trying the experiment of living'.","quote":"To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/205/pg205.txt"],"notes":"Harvard 1833–37. Resigned from Concord's public school within weeks rather than flog pupils, then ran a progressive academy with his brother for four years."},{"name":"Frederick Douglass","dates":"c. 1818–1895","occupation":"Abolitionist, orator, writer","criticised":["institutional authority","other"],"summary":"His Narrative (1845) records his master forbidding his wife to teach him letters because reading would 'forever unfit him to be a slave'; Douglass took the prohibition as instruction and learned to read by trading bread with white boys. His quarrel is with a regime that made literacy a crime, not with schooling.","quote":"From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/23/pg23.txt"],"notes":"Never attended a school of any kind; taught other enslaved men to read at a Sabbath school. The case where the point of education was exactly that it was forbidden."},{"name":"Herbert Spencer","dates":"1820–1903","occupation":"Philosopher, sociologist","criticised":["compulsory schooling","rote instruction","standardised curricula"],"summary":"Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861) calls classical schooling ornamental paint, condemns 'the vicious system of rote learning', and answers 'What knowledge is of most worth?' with science. In Social Statics he opposed state and compulsory schooling as an infringement of liberty.","quote":"so, a boy's drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16510/pg16510.txt"],"notes":"Taught by his father and uncle; declined Cambridge. An autodidact who wanted everyone taught science and nobody compelled to attend."},{"name":"Francis Galton","dates":"1822–1911","occupation":"Polymath, statistician, founder of eugenics","criticised":["standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"Chafed at a narrow classical curriculum and left school at sixteen; Hereditary Genius (1869) then dismissed the idea that 'babies are born pretty much alike', arguing eminence is inherited, so that schooling cannot manufacture ability.","quote":"I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_Genius"],"notes":"The critique of education here is that it does not matter much, which is a different objection from everyone else's and an ugly one."},{"name":"Thomas Henry Huxley","dates":"1825–1895","occupation":"Biologist, professor at the Royal School of Mines, London School Board member","criticised":["standardised curricula","universities","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"'A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It' (1868) and 'Science and Culture' (1880) attack the monopoly of classics in schools and universities and demand laboratory science; he sat on the first London School Board (1870) to shape state elementary schooling.","quote":"The great end of life is not knowledge but action.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley"],"notes":"Two years of school, self-taught, medical apprentice; won a University of London medal but never took the degree."},{"name":"Leo Tolstoy","dates":"1828–1910","occupation":"Novelist, landowner, schoolmaster","criticised":["compulsory schooling","institutional authority","childhood conformity"],"summary":"After touring European schools in 1860–61 he ran a school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana with voluntary attendance, no punishments and no timetable, and published 'Should we teach the peasant children to write, or should they teach us?'. Tsarist harassment ended the experiment.","quote":"Should we teach the peasant children to write, or should they teach us?","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy"],"notes":"Kazan University, left without a degree; teachers found him unable and unwilling to learn. The quotation is an essay title. He later wrote an ABC book used across Russia."},{"name":"Mark Twain","dates":"1835–1910","occupation":"Writer, printer, riverboat pilot","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority"],"summary":"His 1887 essay 'English as She Is Taught', built on schoolchildren's answers collected by a Brooklyn teacher, calls the results 'brickbat culture' and blames not the child but the 'unintelligent Boards, Committees, and Trustees' for cramming rules pupils cannot use.","quote":"If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, but the unintelligent teacher—or rather the unintelligent Boards, Committees, and Trustees—are the proper target for it.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/09/25/schooling-vs-education/","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain"],"notes":"'I have never let my schooling interfere with my education' is misattributed: Quote Investigator traces it to Grant Allen (1894). Left school after fifth grade; honorary doctorates from Yale, Missouri and Oxford."},{"name":"William James","dates":"1842–1910","occupation":"Psychologist and philosopher, Harvard professor","criticised":["credentialism","universities","examinations"],"summary":"'The Ph.D. Octopus' (1903) opens with a brilliant Harvard student refused a post for lacking a doctorate and warns that America is drifting toward a state in which no one is respectable 'unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him'. James himself held only an MD.","quote":"no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/octopus.html"],"notes":"Thirty-odd years on the Harvard faculty without a PhD. He called the degree 'a sham, a bauble, a dodge' while running one of the catalogues."},{"name":"Friedrich Nietzsche","dates":"1844–1900","occupation":"Professor of classical philology, philosopher","criticised":["universities","standardised curricula","institutional authority"],"summary":"In five Basel lectures of 1872, 'On the Future of Our Educational Institutions', he diagnosed two ruinous tendencies: the greatest possible expansion of education, driven by the state and by money, and its narrowing into specialism and journalism. He withdrew the lectures from publication.","quote":"a striving to achieve the greatest possible expansion of education on the one hand, and a tendency to minimise and weaken it on the other","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEENietzscheFutureTableCut.pdf"],"notes":"Made professor at Basel at 24 without a completed doctorate. He wanted education for the few; mass education he called a road to barbarism. Weaponisable in every direction."},{"name":"Booker T. Washington","dates":"1856–1915","occupation":"Educator, founder of Tuskegee Institute","criticised":["learning separated from doing","standardised curricula"],"summary":"Up From Slavery (1901) describes a young man 'with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and weeds in the yard' studying a French grammar; Tuskegee students built their own campus. Du Bois attacked him for conceding liberal education.","quote":"the chief ambition among a large proportion of them was to get an education so that they would not have to work any longer with their hands","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2376/pg2376.txt"],"notes":"Hampton Institute (entrance exam: sweeping a room). Headed Tuskegee for thirty-four years and helped seed over 5,000 Rosenwald schools."},{"name":"George Bernard Shaw","dates":"1856–1950","occupation":"Playwright, Fabian, co-founder of the LSE","criticised":["compulsory schooling","childhood conformity","institutional authority"],"summary":"The preface to Misalliance (1910) says a school is 'to begin with... a prison' and that his own schooling 'did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever'; 'Maxims for Revolutionists' adds 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.' He nonetheless backed state education and helped found a university college.","quote":"there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":false,"sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/files/908/908-h/908-h.htm","https://www.panarchy.org/shaw/maxims.1903.html"],"notes":"Four Dublin schools he loathed, left at fifteen, self-taught in the British Museum reading room."},{"name":"John Dewey","dates":"1859–1952","occupation":"Philosopher, professor at Michigan, Chicago and Columbia","criticised":["rote instruction","learning separated from doing","childhood conformity"],"summary":"'My Pedagogic Creed' (1897) declares that 'education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living'; Experience and Education (1938) then rebuked progressive schools for confusing freedom with the absence of any plan. He wanted public schools remade, not abandoned.","quote":"a process of living and not a preparation for future living","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey"],"notes":"The man most cited by free-schoolers spent his last decades correcting them."},{"name":"Jane Addams","dates":"1860–1935","occupation":"Settlement-house founder, reformer, Nobel Peace laureate","criticised":["learning separated from doing","universities"],"summary":"'The Snare of Preparation' (Twenty Years at Hull-House, 1910) confesses that after college she spent years 'lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation' and that 'the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly'. She declined a University of Chicago faculty post to keep Hull House independent.","quote":"I gradually reached a conviction that the first generation of college women had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/items/show/6195"],"notes":"Rockford Female Seminary valedictorian 1881. Served on the Chicago Board of Education. The phrase 'snare of preparation' is hers via Tolstoy."},{"name":"Rabindranath Tagore","dates":"1861–1941","occupation":"Poet, composer, founder of Santiniketan and Visva-Bharati","criticised":["rote instruction","examinations","childhood conformity"],"summary":"His fable 'The Parrot's Training' (1918) has pundits stuff a caged bird with book-leaves until it can neither whistle nor whisper, and the court pronounces its education complete when it is dead. He founded a school under trees at Santiniketan (1901) and a university (1921).","quote":"Its throat was so completely choked with the leaves from the books that it could neither whistle nor whisper.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.thebeacon.in/2019/01/15/the-parrots-training/"],"notes":"Loathed and escaped every school he was put in; University College London law, left without a degree. Nobel laureate in literature, 1913."},{"name":"Rudolf Steiner","dates":"1861–1925","occupation":"Philosopher, founder of anthroposophy and the Waldorf school","criticised":["institutional authority","examinations","standardised curricula"],"summary":"His 1919 threefold social order places schools in the cultural sphere, to be administered by teachers without interference from state or economy; the first Waldorf school, founded that year for Stuttgart cigarette-factory workers' children, was co-educational, comprehensive, self-governing, and hostile to early academic drilling and grades.","quote":null,"quote_status":"none","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_threefolding"],"notes":"PhD Rostock 1891; never held a chair. His writings on race and reincarnation are a live controversy for the schools."},{"name":"Alfred North Whitehead","dates":"1861–1947","occupation":"Mathematician, philosopher, professor at Cambridge, London and Harvard","criticised":["examinations","rote instruction","standardised curricula"],"summary":"The Aims of Education (1929) attacks 'inert ideas', received into the mind without being used or tested, and says 'no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste'. He said this while serving on the Senate of the University of London.","quote":"no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead"],"notes":"The insider's critique: nobody on this list was more thoroughly of the institution."},{"name":"George Washington Carver","dates":"c. 1864–1943","occupation":"Agricultural scientist, teacher (Tuskegee)","criticised":["learning separated from doing"],"summary":"Born enslaved and barred from the local school, Carver took Iowa State degrees and taught at Tuskegee for 47 years; his complaint was not with education but with education that stayed on campus, so he designed the Jesup Agricultural Wagon (1906), a movable school carrying plows, seeds and demonstrations to farmers who could not travel.","quote":null,"quote_status":"none","quote_source":null,"attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver","http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1870"],"notes":"This entry is for education: the movable school extended the classroom rather than rejecting it. The popular Carver education quotations circulate largely via a 2003 compilation and are not used."},{"name":"Mohandas Gandhi","dates":"1869–1948","occupation":"Lawyer, political leader","criticised":["learning separated from doing","standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"Hind Swaraj (1909) says education 'simply means a knowledge of letters', an instrument that can be abused, that Macaulay's English-medium system 'has enslaved us'; the Nai Talim scheme (1937) proposed teaching through productive craft in the mother tongue.","quote":"What is the meaning of education? It simply means a knowledge of letters. It is merely an instrument, and an instrument may be well used or abused.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/hind-swaraj/chapter-18-education.php","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nai_Talim"],"notes":"The Inner Temple in London: a barrister attacking English education. Independent India rejected Nai Talim for a centralised system."},{"name":"Maria Montessori","dates":"1870–1952","occupation":"Physician, educator","criticised":["childhood conformity","institutional authority","rote instruction"],"summary":"The Montessori Method (1912) says 'the principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy', offering the stationary school desk as proof, with children 'like butterflies mounted on pins', and rejects prizes and punishments.","quote":"the children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place, the desk","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39863/pg39863.txt"],"notes":"University of Rome medical degree 1896. Left Italy in 1934 after her schools fell out with Mussolini, who had first sponsored them."},{"name":"Bertrand Russell","dates":"1872–1970","occupation":"Philosopher, mathematician, Cambridge lecturer","criticised":["institutional authority","standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"'Free Thought and Official Propaganda' (1922) charges that 'the whole machinery of the State... is turned on to making defenceless children believe absurd propositions'. Dissatisfied with both traditional and progressive schools, he and Dora Russell founded Beacon Hill in 1927; he left it in 1932.","quote":"The whole machinery of the State, in all the different countries, is turned on to making defenceless children believe absurd propositions the effect of which is to make them willing to die in defence of sinister interests.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44932/44932-h/44932-h.htm","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_Hill_School"],"notes":"Home-tutored, Trinity College Cambridge; dismissed by Trinity in 1916 for pacifism. 'Men are born ignorant, not stupid' is not on Wikiquote's sourced list; avoid it."},{"name":"Winston Churchill","dates":"1874–1965","occupation":"Soldier, journalist, politician, Prime Minister","criticised":["examinations","standardised curricula"],"summary":"My Early Life (1930) says that by staying so long in Harrow's lowest form he 'gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys' who went on to Latin and Greek while he was taught English, and that he 'would have liked to have been examined in history, poetry and writing essays. The examiners, on the other hand, were partial to Latin and mathematics. And their will prevailed.'","quote":"Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/24/ready-to-learn/","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Early_Life"],"notes":"The quotation is House of Commons, 4 November 1952. Harrow, Sandhurst; no university, later Chancellor of Bristol."},{"name":"Robert Frost","dates":"1874–1963","occupation":"Poet, college teacher","criticised":["credentialism","universities","other"],"summary":"Left Dartmouth after two months and Harvard after two years without a degree, then taught for decades at Amherst, Michigan and Bread Loaf while collecting more than forty honorary degrees; 'Education by Poetry' argues that a person not 'at home in the metaphor' is 'not safe in science; you are not safe in history'.","quote":null,"quote_status":"dubious","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Frost"],"notes":"'Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence' is traced only to Reader's Digest, April 1960; no primary source, so left null."},{"name":"Albert Einstein","dates":"1879–1955","occupation":"Theoretical physicist, professor at Zurich, Prague, Berlin, Princeton","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority","examinations"],"summary":"He left Munich's Luitpold Gymnasium at fifteen, finding its rote regimen harmful, and thrived at the Pestalozzian cantonal school in Aarau; his Autobiographical Notes (1949) call it 'nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry'.","quote":"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/10/05/miracle-curiosity/","https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/09/07/forgotten/"],"notes":"ETH Zurich diploma 1900, PhD 1905, then a lifetime of professorships. 'Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school' is not his: in a 1936 address he quoted it as the definition of an unnamed 'wit'. The fish-climbing-a-tree line is not his either."},{"name":"Helen Keller","dates":"1880–1968","occupation":"Writer, lecturer, socialist activist","criticised":["examinations","rote instruction","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"The Story of My Life (1903) records that Radcliffe was not the romance she had expected: 'One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think', there is 'no time to commune with one's thoughts', and examinations are 'the chief bugbears of my college life'. She graduated cum laude anyway.","quote":"One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller"],"notes":"Radcliffe BA 1904, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. Wanted poor children to have what she had."},{"name":"Virginia Woolf","dates":"1882–1941","occupation":"Novelist, essayist","criticised":["universities","institutional authority","credentialism"],"summary":"Three Guineas (1938) traces 'Arthur's Education Fund', the family money spent on sons and denied daughters, links the universities' processions to possessiveness and war, and suggests the guinea for a women's college be earmarked 'Rags. Petrol. Matches' to burn the old college down, before proposing a poor college that teaches 'the art of understanding other people's lives and minds'.","quote":"Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200931.txt","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Guineas"],"notes":"Home-educated; classes at King's College London's Ladies' Department, no degree. Refused honorary degrees. The burning is rhetorical; the next paragraph asks the same college to teach differently."},{"name":"A. S. Neill","dates":"1883–1973","occupation":"Schoolmaster, founder of Summerhill","criticised":["compulsory schooling","institutional authority","childhood conformity"],"summary":"Summerhill (founded 1921) made lessons optional and gave children a majority vote in the school meeting; his 1960 book says he would 'rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar'.","quote":"I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.panarchy.org/neill/summerhill.html","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/A._S._Neill"],"notes":"A poor pupil, then pupil-teacher, then an Edinburgh MA in English (1912); son of a village dominie."},{"name":"Eleanor Roosevelt","dates":"1884–1962","occupation":"Teacher, First Lady, diplomat","criticised":["rote instruction","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"'Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education' (1930) rejects 'the acquisition of knowledge, the reading of books, and the learning of facts' for the view that 'the function of education is to give children a desire to learn and to teach them how to use their minds'. She was then teaching three days a week at the Todhunter School.","quote":"The function of education is to give children a desire to learn and to teach them how to use their minds.","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/education/good-citizenship-purpose-education/"],"notes":"Private tutors, then Allenswood; summoned home to debut at eighteen and later regretted missing college."},{"name":"Srinivasa Ramanujan","dates":"1887–1920","occupation":"Mathematician","criticised":["examinations","standardised curricula"],"summary":"An outsider case rather than a critic: he taught himself from Carr's Synopsis, lost his college scholarship for neglecting every subject but mathematics, failed the Fellow of Arts exam twice, and told Hardy in 1913 that he had no university education. Hardy later judged he might have been greater 'if he could have been caught and tamed a little in his youth'.","quote":"I have no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Letter to G. H. Hardy, 16 January 1913","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan"],"notes":"He never criticised schooling in words; the critique is his biographers'. Not anti-institution: went to Cambridge, took a BA by research (1916), FRS (1918), Fellow of Trinity."},{"name":"Ludwig Wittgenstein","dates":"1889–1951","occupation":"Philosopher, Cambridge professor, village schoolteacher","criticised":["universities","institutional authority"],"summary":"After the Tractatus he took a teacher-training course and taught in Austrian village primary schools from 1920 to 1926, compiling a spelling dictionary for pupils; as Cambridge professor he urged students not to become academic philosophers and resigned to escape the job.","quote":"Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?","quote_status":"well attested","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":false,"sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein"],"notes":"Cambridge PhD 1929 with the Tractatus as thesis. Quotation is from Culture and Value."},{"name":"Peter Drucker","dates":"1909–2005","occupation":"Management theorist, professor (Bennington, NYU, Claremont)","criticised":["universities"],"summary":"Drucker did not doubt education; he doubted the residential campus as a delivery system. In a 1997 Forbes interview he predicted that within thirty years the big campuses would be relics replaced by distance learning.","quote":"Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Forbes, 10 March 1997","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/09/17/university/","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker"],"notes":"Doctorate in law, Frankfurt (1931); taught for over sixty years. The prediction's deadline (2027) has not been met."},{"name":"Paul Goodman","dates":"1911–1972","occupation":"Writer, social critic, anarchist intellectual","criticised":["compulsory schooling","credentialism","institutional authority","childhood conformity"],"summary":"Compulsory Mis-education (1964) argued the ever-lengthening compulsory system had become 'a universal trap', and that many young people 'might be better off if the system simply did not exist, even if they then had no formal schooling at all'; he proposed no school at all for some ages, storefront mini-schools, apprenticeships and the city as classroom. Not anti-learning: The Community of Scholars (1962) defended small face-to-face colleges.","quote":"The compulsory system has become a universal trap, and it is no good.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Compulsory Mis-education (1964), 'The Universal Trap'","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goodman","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_Miseducation","https://archive.org/stream/CompulsoryMiseducation-PaulGoodman/compulsory-goodman_djvu.txt"],"notes":"BA CCNY, PhD Chicago (1954); short teaching spells at Chicago, NYU, Black Mountain, Sarah Lawrence, Wisconsin–Milwaukee, San Francisco State. Wanted schooling drastically shortened and decentralised: the end of compulsion, not of public provision."},{"name":"Marshall McLuhan","dates":"1911–1980","occupation":"Professor of English (Toronto), media theorist","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"McLuhan's target was the classroom as a sealed, fragmented, print-era box inside an information-rich electric environment: the dropout who asks why he should go back to school and interrupt his education. He proposed rebuilding schools around discovery rather than instruction.","quote":"The metropolis today is a classroom; the ads are its teachers. The traditional classroom is an obsolete detention home, a feudal dungeon.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Counterblast (1969), p. 12","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan"],"notes":"PhD Cambridge; Toronto 1946 until death. An insider's critique."},{"name":"Jerome Bruner","dates":"1915–2016","occupation":"Cognitive psychologist, professor (Harvard, Oxford, NYU)","criticised":["rote instruction","standardised curricula"],"summary":"The Process of Education (1960) argued that curricula waste years postponing 'difficult' subjects and that teaching the structure of a discipline matters more than facts, proposing a spiral curriculum. Bruner wanted schools better, not gone; he led the federally funded MACOS curriculum.","quote":"We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Process of Education (1960), ch. 3, p. 33","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bruner","https://infed.org/dir/welcome/jerome-bruner-and-the-process-of-education/"],"notes":"BA Duke, PhD Harvard (1941); Watts Professor at Oxford 1972–80, then NYU. A curriculum reformer who endorsed institutional programmes. Included to show the list is not an abolitionists' roll-call."},{"name":"Alan Watts","dates":"1915–1973","occupation":"Philosopher, lecturer, former Episcopal priest","criticised":["childhood conformity","other"],"summary":"Watts attacked graded schooling as a corridor that teaches children to defer living toward a payoff that never arrives: nursery school points to kindergarten, grades to high school, high school to college, college to a job with a quota.","quote":"But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Recorded lecture 'Coincidence of Opposites'","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Watts"],"notes":"Never an undergraduate; master's in theology from Seabury-Western; taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies. Attribution rests on his own audio recording transcribed by third parties."},{"name":"Richard Feynman","dates":"1918–1988","occupation":"Theoretical physicist; Nobel laureate; Caltech professor","criticised":["rote instruction","examinations","standardised curricula","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"Teaching in Rio in 1951–52 he found physics students who could recite definitions perfectly yet could not connect them to the sunlight on the bay outside, and told Brazilian educators that the exam-passing system was self-propagating memorisation. In 1964 he sat on California's textbook commission and found the review process hollow.","quote":"So, you see, they could pass the examinations, and 'learn' all this stuff, and not know anything at all, except what they had memorized.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), 'O Americano, Outra Vez!'","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman","https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education"],"notes":"MIT BS 1939, Princeton PhD 1942; Cornell, then Caltech 1952–88. Target is a pedagogy that rewards recall over understanding, not schooling; he volunteered for the state curriculum commission."},{"name":"Isaac Asimov","dates":"1920–1992","occupation":"Writer; biochemist; professor of biochemistry, Boston University","criticised":["standardised curricula","rote instruction","other"],"summary":"Asimov's complaint was the lockstep: everyone forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed; in the 1988 Bill Moyers interview he imagined home access to information 'in addition to school' so each person could follow their own bent.","quote":"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Science Past, Science Future (1975)","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov","https://billmoyers.com/content/isaac-asimov/"],"notes":"Columbia PhD (1948). Boston University from 1949; removed from teaching duties in 1958 and kept the title, so 'taught in a university' is technically true and practically brief. He explicitly said 'in addition to school', not instead of it."},{"name":"Ray Bradbury","dates":"1920–2012","occupation":"Writer","criticised":["universities","institutional authority","credentialism"],"summary":"Bradbury's objection was economic and aesthetic: colleges cost money most students do not have, and creative-writing teachers impose their tastes, whereas the library 'has no biases'. He said this at a 2009 benefit for a threatened Ventura public library and again in his Paris Review interview.","quote":"Libraries raised me. I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The New York Times, 19 June 2009","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":false,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury","https://lithub.com/ray-bradburys-greatest-writing-advice/"],"notes":"No college because of the Depression; 'I graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight'. A public-library evangelist, never spoke against public schools; his 'would not tell you to go' is specific to writers and to money."},{"name":"Paulo Freire","dates":"1921–1997","occupation":"Educator, philosopher of education","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970) Freire attacked the 'banking' concept of education, in which the teacher deposits knowledge into passive students who receive, file and store it. His alternative was dialogical, problem-posing education: a critique of a method and its politics, not of schools as such.","quote":"Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ch. 2 (Ramos translation)","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire","http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon2/pedagogy/pedagogychapter2.html","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire"],"notes":"Law degree from Recife (never practised); visiting professor at Harvard (1969); Municipal Secretary of Education for São Paulo (1988), i.e. he ran a public school system. The much-quoted 'There is no such thing as a neutral educational process' is from Richard Shaull's foreword, not Freire; routinely misattributed."},{"name":"John Holt","dates":"1923–1985","occupation":"Schoolteacher, author, homeschooling advocate","criticised":["compulsory schooling","examinations","childhood conformity","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"How Children Fail (1964) argued from classroom observation that children fail because they are afraid, bored and confused, and learn strategies for pleasing or evading the teacher instead of learning; after brief Harvard and Berkeley lectureships he gave up on reforming schools and in Instead of Education (1976) and Teach Your Own (1981) urged parents to take children out of compulsory school altogether.","quote":"It is a rare child who can come through his schooling with much left of his curiosity, his independence, or his sense of his own dignity, competence, and worth.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"How Children Fail (1964)","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(American_educator)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Children_Fail","https://www.johnholtgws.com/who-was-john-holt","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Holt"],"notes":"Yale BS industrial engineering (1943); about fourteen years teaching in private schools; visiting lecturer at Harvard (1968) and Berkeley (1969). Later held that a school, 'a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life', was 'a wrong idea from the word go'."},{"name":"Freeman Dyson","dates":"1923–2020","occupation":"Theoretical physicist; professor, Institute for Advanced Study","criticised":["credentialism","examinations"],"summary":"Dyson, who never took a PhD yet became a Cornell professor and a lifetime IAS professor, called the PhD an abomination: a nineteenth-century device for training German professors that has become a union card, takes too long, and drives women out of science.","quote":"I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Quanta Magazine, 26 March 2014","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-puzzle-worthy-of-freeman-dyson-20140326/","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson"],"notes":"A product of elite schooling: Winchester, a Cambridge scholarship at 15, Trinity BA. Objection is to the doctorate as a job licence, not to universities, which he inhabited for seventy years."},{"name":"James Baldwin","dates":"1924–1987","occupation":"Novelist; essayist","criticised":["childhood conformity","institutional authority","standardised curricula"],"summary":"In 'A Talk to Teachers' (1963) Baldwin argues that the purpose of education is to make a person able to look at the world for himself, while what any society actually wants from its schools is obedient citizens. He never went to college but later taught at Bowling Green, Hampshire and UMass Amherst.","quote":"The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"'A Talk to Teachers', The Saturday Review, 21 December 1963","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin","http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/JAMES%20BALDWIN%20A%20Talk%20to%20Teachers.htm"],"notes":"The essay is addressed to teachers and asks them to do their job better; it critiques what schooling is for, not attending."},{"name":"Malcolm X","dates":"1925–1965","occupation":"Minister; human-rights activist","criticised":["credentialism","institutional authority","universities"],"summary":"Having left school after a teacher told him law was no realistic goal for a Black boy, he taught himself to read in Norfolk Prison Colony by copying the dictionary; in the Autobiography he says he wanted no degree of the kind a college confers as a status symbol, and that prison let him study harder than a college full of distractions would have.","quote":"I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), ch. 11","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_X","https://infed.org/mobi/malcolm-x-on-education/"],"notes":"He also said he would have liked a formal academic education, so this is a critique of credentials-as-status and of what school offered a Black child in 1940, not of study. The Autobiography is a collaboration with Alex Haley, which qualifies every verbatim line."},{"name":"Ivan Illich","dates":"1926–2002","occupation":"Catholic priest, social critic, historian","criticised":["compulsory schooling","credentialism","institutional authority","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"In Deschooling Society (1971) Illich argued that compulsory institutional schooling teaches people to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education and a diploma with competence, and proposed disestablishing school as the church was disestablished, banning discrimination on the basis of prior schooling, and replacing schools with voluntary 'learning webs'. He attacked the institution and its credential monopoly, not learning; he also called free-market education reformers 'the most dangerous category'.","quote":"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Deschooling Society (1971), ch. 7","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society","https://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich"],"notes":"Doctorate in medieval history (Salzburg); vice-rector of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, founded CIDOC in Cuernavaca, later taught at Penn State, Bremen and Hagen. A man with a doctorate who spent his last decades as a visiting professor while arguing the state should 'make no law with respect to the establishment of education'."},{"name":"Seymour Papert","dates":"1928–2016","occupation":"Mathematician, computer scientist, MIT professor","criticised":["rote instruction","learning separated from doing","standardised curricula"],"summary":"In Mindstorms (1980) Papert attacked computer-aided instruction that uses the machine to program the child, and the wider 'instructionist' model of transmitting knowledge to passive pupils; his constructionism has children build things and learn mathematics by using it.","quote":"One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Mindstorms (1980), introduction","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert","https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/mindstorms/","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert"],"notes":"Two maths PhDs (Witwatersrand, Cambridge); worked with Piaget; at MIT from 1963. Criticised 'School' as an institution resistant to change yet ran all his projects inside schools 'because that is where the children are'."},{"name":"Noam Chomsky","dates":"b. 1928","occupation":"Linguist, MIT professor (1955–2002), political critic","criticised":["institutional authority","childhood conformity","rote instruction","examinations"],"summary":"Chomsky has repeatedly argued that mass schooling was designed to produce obedience, that teaching to the test is 'a disciplinary technique' and that elite universities select for obedience; in the same breath he defends free public education and the university as a public good, calling its corporatisation and debt-funding a form of social control.","quote":"Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Interview, Rolling Stone, 28 May 1992","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky","https://chomsky.info/19920528/","https://www.guernicamag.com/noam_chomsky_public_education/","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky"],"notes":"Forty-seven years on the MIT faculty. The ubiquitous 'Education is a system of imposed ignorance' is absent from Wikiquote and found only on aggregators; treat as dubious. Critic of what schooling does; defender of its existence and of its being free."},{"name":"Maya Angelou","dates":"1928–2014","occupation":"Poet; memoirist; Reynolds Professor, Wake Forest University","criticised":["institutional authority","childhood conformity","other"],"summary":"Her indictment, in the 1940 graduation chapter of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is of a segregated system in which a visiting white official told Black eighth-graders their future was athletics while white children were promised science and art. She held no degree yet taught at Wake Forest for nearly thirty years and called herself 'a teacher who writes'.","quote":"The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), ch. 23","attended_university":false,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou","https://mayaangelou.wfu.edu/story/"],"notes":"The weakest fit on the list and framed carefully: she did not distrust schooling, she distrusted what a Jim Crow school was permitted to promise its pupils. Never attended college; first Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest 1982–2011; over fifty honorary degrees."},{"name":"Neil Postman","dates":"1931–2003","occupation":"Media theorist, professor of education (NYU)","criticised":["rote instruction","standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969, with Charles Weingartner) attacked trivial curricula and the 'telling' method, proposing an inquiry method meant to build 'crap detectors'; The End of Education (1995) argued schools fail for lack of a sustaining narrative, while defending public schools because 'public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.'","quote":"The purpose is to help all students develop built-in, shockproof crap detectors as basic equipment in their survival kits.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Education","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neil_Postman"],"notes":"EdD Teachers College Columbia; NYU faculty 1959–2002. 'Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods' appears in the 1969 book but is introduced there as 'an old aphorism', so crediting it to Postman is a misattribution. Reversed himself in Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979)."},{"name":"Carl Sagan","dates":"1934–1996","occupation":"Astronomer; science populariser; Cornell professor","criticised":["rote instruction","childhood conformity","other"],"summary":"In the preface to The Demon-Haunted World Sagan says he had no inspirational science teachers at any level of school, only rote memorisation with no sense of wonder; his curiosity survived on library books and his parents. In a 1996 interview he said children start as natural scientists and 'we beat it out of them'.","quote":"I wish I could tell you about inspirational teachers in science from my elementary or junior high or high school days. But as I think back on it, there were none.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Demon-Haunted World (1995), preface","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan","https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199601/carl-sagan"],"notes":"Chicago BA/BS/MS/PhD (1960); Harvard (denied tenure), Cornell 1968–96. The 'beat it out of them' line is usually quoted without its second sentence: 'A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.'"},{"name":"Audre Lorde","dates":"1934–1992","occupation":"Poet; essayist; librarian; professor (John Jay, Hunter)","criticised":["universities","institutional authority","credentialism","other"],"summary":"At a 1979 NYU conference Lorde attacked academic feminism's habit of theorising about women while excluding poor, Black, Third World and lesbian women, calling it 'a particular academic arrogance' and observing that 'survival is not an academic skill'.","quote":"For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Sister Outsider (1984), pp. 110–113","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde"],"notes":"Hunter BA 1959, Columbia MLS 1961. Her target is the academy as an institution that reproduces exclusion, delivered from a podium at that academy by a tenured professor; the 'master's tools' line is now stretched to cover any institution."},{"name":"Wendell Berry","dates":"b. 1934","occupation":"Farmer, essayist, poet, novelist","criticised":["universities","other"],"summary":"Berry's complaint is that the university has abandoned the idea that its product is a whole human being and has become a warehouse of specialisms training workers for employers.","quote":"Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"'Thoughts in the Presence of Fear', Orion, autumn 2001","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry","https://akronaaup.org/from-thoughts-in-the-presence-of-fear-by-wendell-berry/"],"notes":"BA/MA Kentucky; taught at NYU and Kentucky. Calls for 'a proper education'; not usable as an anti-education figure."},{"name":"John Taylor Gatto","dates":"1935–2018","occupation":"Public-school English teacher (New York City, about thirty years), author","criticised":["compulsory schooling","childhood conformity","institutional authority","standardised curricula"],"summary":"Named New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991, Gatto announced his retirement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying he no longer wished to hurt kids to make a living, and in 'The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher' argued that compulsory schooling's real curriculum is confusion, class position, indifference, dependency, provisional self-esteem and surveillance, whatever the timetable says.","quote":"I've come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"'I Quit, I Think', Wall Street Journal, 25 July 1991","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbing_Us_Down","https://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/i-quit-i-think/","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto"],"notes":"Spent three decades as a state-certified public-school teacher and won the state's top award before writing that state-certified teachers probably guarantee education won't happen. Wade Carpenter: 'one-sided, angry and hyperbolic, [but] not inaccurate.'"},{"name":"Frank Zappa","dates":"1940–1993","occupation":"Composer; musician","criticised":["compulsory schooling","institutional authority","childhood conformity"],"summary":"On the 1966 Freak Out! sleeve Zappa told teenagers to drop out before the 'mediocre educational system' rotted their minds and to educate themselves in the library; he left Chaffey College after one semester and later took his own children out of school at 15.","quote":"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Liner notes to Freak Out! (1966)","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":false,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa","https://www.donlope.net/fz/notes/Freak_Out.html"],"notes":"'If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library' is dubious: absent from Wikiquote, no Quote Investigator entry, every hit is an aggregator; it looks like a later paraphrase of the 1966 liner note."},{"name":"Peter Gray","dates":"b. 1944","occupation":"Research professor of psychology, Boston College; author of Free to Learn","criticised":["compulsory schooling","examinations","childhood conformity","institutional authority"],"summary":"Gray argues that children are biologically built to educate themselves through play and exploration, and that compulsory, age-graded, coercive schooling suppresses that drive; his preferred model is the Sudbury Valley School and self-directed education.","quote":"I do not believe that we should just do away with schools and replace them with nothing.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"'Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education', Psychology Today, 9 September 2009","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gray_(psychologist)","https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-to-learn/200909/seven-sins-of-our-system-of-forced-education"],"notes":"Columbia BA; Rockefeller PhD; a career academic and author of a standard introductory psychology textbook. The objection is to compulsion, not to schools existing."},{"name":"Camille Paglia","dates":"b. 1947","occupation":"Cultural critic, professor (University of the Arts, 1984–2024)","criticised":["universities","credentialism","standardised curricula","institutional authority"],"summary":"Paglia has attacked the university as run by bureaucrats and the assumption that everyone should go to college: in 'Revalorizing the Trades' (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2010) she calls pressuring middle-class youth into office jobs cruelly shortsighted and demands vocational and technical schools.","quote":"We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 August 2010","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia"],"notes":"'The university is a colossal failure' could not be sourced; attested is 'The universities are an absolute wreck right now' (Reason, 2016). Yale PhD. She wants optional vocational tracks inside the public system, not its abolition."},{"name":"Ken Robinson","dates":"1950–2020","occupation":"Educationalist, professor of arts education (Warwick), speaker","criticised":["standardised curricula","childhood conformity","credentialism","examinations"],"summary":"In the 2006 TED talk 'Do Schools Kill Creativity?' Robinson argued that national systems built on an industrial model, with a fixed subject hierarchy and mistakes treated as the worst thing you can make, educate people out of their creative capacities, and that public education worldwide is 'a protracted process of university entrance' now suffering 'academic inflation'. He wanted schooling redesigned, not abandoned.","quote":"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"TED, February 2006","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Robinson_(educationalist)","https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity/transcript","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Robinson"],"notes":"PhD London (1981); Professor of Arts Education at Warwick 1989–2001; knighted 2003. In the same talk he joked that degrees 'aren't worth anything' because of academic inflation, while holding a PhD and a chair."},{"name":"bell hooks","dates":"1952–2021","occupation":"Writer; cultural critic; professor (Yale, Oberlin, CCNY, Berea)","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority","universities","childhood conformity"],"summary":"In Teaching to Transgress hooks contrasts her all-Black Kentucky grade school, where learning was 'the practice of freedom', with the desegregated white school and then Stanford, where the primary lesson was obedience; she rejects the 'banking system' while insisting the classroom is still 'the most radical space of possibility in the academy'.","quote":"Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Teaching to Transgress (1994), introduction","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_hooks","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bell_hooks"],"notes":"Stanford BA, Wisconsin MA, UC Santa Cruz PhD (1983). Her critique is entirely from inside the university and aimed at reforming it; she loved school as a child ('School was the place of ecstasy')."},{"name":"Sugata Mitra","dates":"b. 1952","occupation":"Professor of educational technology (Newcastle, 2006–2019)","criticised":["rote instruction","institutional authority","standardised curricula","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"In his 2013 TED Prize talk Mitra argued the school system is not broken but obsolete: built by the Victorians to produce interchangeable clerks for a bureaucratic empire.","quote":"It's not [broken]. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"TED2013, 26 February 2013","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugata_Mitra","https://blog.ted.com/a-school-in-the-cloud-sugata-mitra-accepts-the-ted-prize-at-ted2013/"],"notes":"PhD solid-state physics. Research sharply criticised (Arora 2010; Warschauer); his SOLE work ran largely inside ordinary state schools, so he worked with public schooling while calling it obsolete."},{"name":"Steve Jobs","dates":"1955–2011","occupation":"Co-founder of Apple","criticised":["standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"In his 2005 Stanford commencement address Jobs said he left Reed after six months because he could not justify spending his parents' savings with no idea how college would help him, then stayed eighteen months as a drop-in taking only classes that interested him, including a calligraphy course that later shaped the Macintosh's typography. The narrow claim is about required classes versus chosen ones, not about college.","quote":"The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Stanford commencement address, 12 June 2005","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs","https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/2005-stanford-commencement-address-by-steve-jobs"],"notes":"He praises the institution and the useless class ('None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life'). 'Stay hungry, stay foolish' is the Whole Earth Catalog's."},{"name":"Bill Gates","dates":"b. 1955","occupation":"Software entrepreneur, philanthropist","criticised":["other","universities"],"summary":"Gates left Harvard in 1975 but his stated complaint is not with schooling; it is that Harvard sent him out knowing nothing about global inequity, and that too many Americans start college and never finish. In 2015 he wrote that his own dropout success was luck and that a degree is the surer path; his foundation has spent billions on schools.","quote":"Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Gates Notes, 3 June 2015","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/06/remarks-of-bill-gates-harvard-commencement-2007/","https://time.com/3908338/bill-gates-college-grads/"],"notes":"The anti-example for any 'dropouts succeed' list: he calls his path luck, funds college completion, and his 2007 critique is of what the curriculum omitted."},{"name":"Alison Gopnik","dates":"b. 1955","occupation":"Professor of psychology, UC Berkeley","criticised":["rote instruction","standardised curricula","examinations","childhood conformity"],"summary":"Gopnik's target is narrow: the belief that 'parenting' is a craft aimed at producing a specified adult, and the downward push of teacher-directed academic instruction into preschool. Her lab's experiments showed that when an adult acted as a teacher, four-year-olds explored less and copied more. An explicit supporter of publicly funded preschool.","quote":"'Parent' is not actually a verb, not a form of work, and it isn't and shouldn't be directed toward the goal of sculpting a child","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Gardener and the Carpenter (2016), p. 8","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Gopnik","https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/03/preschool-lessons-new-research-shows-that-teaching-kids-more-and-more-at-ever-younger-ages-may-backfire.html"],"notes":"Regularly cited by unschoolers but is not one; the argument is about age-appropriate pedagogy, not against schools."},{"name":"Nassim Nicholas Taleb","dates":"b. 1960","occupation":"Former options trader, essayist, professor of risk engineering (NYU Tandon)","criticised":["universities","learning separated from doing","credentialism"],"summary":"Taleb's target is the belief that formal academic knowledge comes first and practice follows, when historically tinkerers and apprentices discovered things and academics later wrote the theory, like lecturing birds on how to fly.","quote":"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Bed of Procrustes (2010)","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb"],"notes":"Wharton MBA, PhD Paris-Dauphine; NYU chair since 2008: the arch-critic of academia holds a named chair. He concedes education raises individual income."},{"name":"David Graeber","dates":"1961–2020","occupation":"Anthropologist; professor, London School of Economics","criticised":["credentialism","universities","institutional authority"],"summary":"Graeber's specific complaints were credentialism and the bureaucratisation of the university: in The Utopia of Rules (2015) he wrote that the real explosion of credentialism since the 1980s has been in the richest economies, where diplomas function like magical objects detached from the knowledge they certify. He nonetheless marched against tuition fees and wanted more free education, not less.","quote":"since the eighties, the real explosion of credentialism has been in what are supposedly the most 'advanced' economies, like the United States, Great Britain, or Canada.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Utopia of Rules (2015), introduction","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber","https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-in-a-bs-job-in-academe-youre-hardly-alone/"],"notes":"Chicago PhD (1996). Yale declined to renew his contract in 2005; moved to Goldsmiths and LSE. Took part in the 2010 London protests against tuition-fee increases."},{"name":"Jordan Peterson","dates":"b. 1962","occupation":"Clinical psychologist, former University of Toronto professor","criticised":["universities","institutional authority","credentialism","other"],"summary":"Peterson attacks universities as captured by ideology and by DEI mandates: in 2017 he announced a plan to cut enrolment in humanities 'indoctrination cults', resigned his Toronto tenure in 2022, and launched Peterson Academy in 2024. McGill PhD; Harvard assistant professor, then Toronto 1998–2021.","quote":"I'm hoping that over about a five-year period, that a concerted effort could be made to knock enrollment down in post-modern, neo-Marxist cult classes by 75% across the West","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Video remarks, 2017, transcribed by Mic, 23 March 2018","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson","https://www.mic.com/articles/188569/jordan-peterson-is-creating-his-own-online-university-to-destroy-college-indoctrination-cults"],"notes":"Narrow target: specific disciplines and university administration, not learning or degrees in general; he tells people to avoid certain departments, not university. The quotation is journalist-transcribed from video."},{"name":"Mike Rowe","dates":"b. 1962","occupation":"Television host, founder of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation","criticised":["credentialism"],"summary":"Rowe does not oppose college; he opposes the 'college for everyone' mandate that treats a four-year degree as the only path to a good life, which he says hollowed out vocational training and left skilled jobs unfilled.","quote":"What I've opposed – consistently - is not the importance of higher education, but rather, the relentless drumbeat of 'college for everyone,'","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Facebook, July 2017, quoted by Fox News, 18 July 2017","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rowe","https://mikerowe.com/2024/03/college-at-any-price/"],"notes":"Communication degree, Towson, 1985; says his own degree 'has served him well'. Easy to misquote as anti-college."},{"name":"Malcolm Gladwell","dates":"b. 1963","occupation":"Journalist, author, podcaster","criticised":["universities","other"],"summary":"Gladwell's quarrel is with prestige, not with college: in David and Goliath (2013) he argues that choosing the most elite school makes bright students small fish who abandon STEM, and in Revisionist History (2016) that Bowdoin's lavish dining hall was bought at the expense of aid for poor students.","quote":"The food at Bowdoin is actually a problem. A moral problem.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Revisionist History, 'Food Fight', July 2016","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell","https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2016/07/updated-bowdoin-responds-to-malcolm-gladwells-food-fight.html"],"notes":"Bowdoin called the episode 'manipulative and disingenuous'. His prescription is to go somewhere you can be a big fish, which is pro-college."},{"name":"William Deresiewicz","dates":"b. 1964","occupation":"Essayist, critic, former Yale professor","criticised":["credentialism","universities","childhood conformity","other"],"summary":"In 'The Disadvantages of an Elite Education' (2008) and Excellent Sheep (2014), Deresiewicz argues that elite admissions select for compliant hoop-jumpers and leave graduates anxious, timid and unable to talk to their plumber; he recommends public universities and liberal arts colleges instead.","quote":"Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The New Republic, 22 July 2014","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellent_Sheep"],"notes":"Three Columbia degrees; taught at Yale 1998–2008, left after being denied tenure. Pro-university and pro-humanities; the complaint is that elite schools have stopped doing education."},{"name":"Matthew B. Crawford","dates":"b. 1965","occupation":"Philosopher, motorcycle mechanic, writer","criticised":["learning separated from doing","credentialism"],"summary":"Crawford's charge is that in the 1990s American schools dismantled shop class to manufacture 'knowledge workers', selling college as the only respectable track and severing students from the material world; he argues manual trades demand real thinking.","quote":"The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), introduction","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Crawford","https://www.vpm.org/npr-news/2009-07-12/excerpt-shop-class-as-soulcraft"],"notes":"Physics BA, PhD political philosophy Chicago (2000). Wants shop class put back into public schools: a different schooling, not less."},{"name":"Peter Thiel","dates":"b. 1967","occupation":"Venture capitalist, entrepreneur","criticised":["credentialism","universities","other"],"summary":"Thiel argues US higher education is a bubble and that elite degrees are positional goods, and in 2011 launched the Thiel Fellowship, which pays people aged 22 or under to skip or leave university to build something. He holds a Stanford BA and JD and taught a Stanford startup class in 2012.","quote":"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"TechCrunch, 10 April 2011","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship","https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/"],"notes":"In the same interview he acknowledges Stanford gave him his co-founders. The fellowship takes roughly 20–30 people a year; Larry Summers called it 'the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade'."},{"name":"Bryan Caplan","dates":"b. 1971","occupation":"Economist, professor (George Mason)","criticised":["credentialism","compulsory schooling","universities","standardised curricula"],"summary":"In The Case Against Education (2018) Caplan argues that most of the private return to schooling is signalling rather than skill, and recommends slashing public subsidies and expanding vocational education. He opens by admitting the system has been very good to him and that he holds a dream job for life.","quote":"The system has been good to me. Very good. I have a dream job for life.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The Case Against Education (2018), introduction","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":false,"would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education","https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/"],"notes":"Caplan distinguishes private from social returns and does not tell strong students to skip college, because the signal still pays the individual. Berkeley BA, Princeton PhD."},{"name":"Elon Musk","dates":"b. 1971","occupation":"Engineer-entrepreneur; founder of the Ad Astra school","criticised":["credentialism","universities","childhood conformity"],"summary":"Musk's narrow claim is that a degree is a poor proxy for ability: in 2020 he said college is for fun and for proving you can do your chores, not for learning, and tweeted that Tesla's AI team required no PhD. He pulled his children out of school in 2014 and founded Ad Astra at SpaceX.","quote":"College are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Satellite 2020 conference, March 2020","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk","https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-college","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Nova_School"],"notes":"Two Penn degrees. Ad Astra closed in 2020; per Isaacson (2023) he moved his children back into ordinary high schools 'to be introduced to the real world'."},{"name":"Naval Ravikant","dates":"b. 1974","occupation":"Investor; co-founder of AngelList","criticised":["rote instruction","credentialism","childhood conformity","learning separated from doing"],"summary":"Ravikant's claim is that access to learning material is no longer the bottleneck and that schooling tends to swap children's curiosity for compliance; the valuable 'specific knowledge' is found by following genuine curiosity and taught by apprenticeship.","quote":"The means of learning are abundant. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"nav.al, 3 April 2019","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ravikant","https://nav.al/love-read"],"notes":"Dartmouth 1995 after Stuyvesant, a selective public school."},{"name":"Ta-Nehisi Coates","dates":"b. 1975","occupation":"Writer, journalist","criticised":["childhood conformity","institutional authority","other"],"summary":"In Between the World and Me (2015) Coates describes the Baltimore public schools he attended as concerned with compliance rather than curiosity, and separates Howard the institution from 'the Mecca', the community on the Yard that actually educated him; he confesses he was made for the library, not the classroom. He left Howard after five years without a degree.","quote":"I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Between the World and Me (2015), p. 48","attended_university":"partly","taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta-Nehisi_Coates"],"notes":"Not an anti-university figure: Howard is his 'only Mecca', and he later taught at MIT, CUNY, NYU and holds the Sterling Brown chair at Howard."},{"name":"Sal Khan","dates":"b. 1976","occupation":"Founder of Khan Academy and Khan Lab School","criticised":["rote instruction","standardised curricula","examinations","childhood conformity"],"summary":"In The One World Schoolhouse (2012) Khan attacks a package inherited from eighteenth-century Prussia: fixed class periods, age-segregated cohorts, and passing grades that let students advance with 'Swiss cheese' gaps. His remedy is mastery learning inside better physical schools with more teacher contact, not fewer schools.","quote":"The idea was not to produce independent thinkers, but to churn out loyal and tractable citizens","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"The One World Schoolhouse (2012), pp. 76–77","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sal_Khan","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Lab_School"],"notes":"MIT BS/MEng, Harvard MBA. Writes that teachers 'become more important' once initial exposure moves online."},{"name":"Yuval Noah Harari","dates":"b. 1976","occupation":"Historian; professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem","criticised":["rote instruction","standardised curricula","other"],"summary":"In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) Harari argues that schools still behave as if information were scarce, cramming pupils with facts that rapid change will make useless, and should instead teach the capacity to keep reinventing oneself. A critique of curriculum content, not of schooling as an institution.","quote":"In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), ch. 19","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":"complicated","would_tell_you_to_go":"it depends","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari","https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari"],"notes":"Oxford DPhil (2002). The sentence usually quoted as 'most of what kids learn today will be irrelevant by 2050' could not be verified verbatim."},{"name":"Cal Newport","dates":"b. 1982","occupation":"Computer scientist; professor, Georgetown University; author","criticised":["credentialism","childhood conformity","other"],"summary":"Newport, a career academic, attacks two specific things: the college-admissions arms race of overscheduling, which he says is both stressful and ineffective, and the 'follow your passion' doctrine. His alternatives assume you will go to college.","quote":null,"quote_status":"none","quote_source":null,"attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":true,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Newport","https://calnewport.com/the-problem-with-passion/"],"notes":"Dartmouth BA, MIT PhD; Provost's Distinguished Professor at Georgetown. The most pro-university figure on the list."},{"name":"Tara Westover","dates":"b. 1986","occupation":"Historian, memoirist","criticised":["institutional authority","credentialism","examinations"],"summary":"Westover, who had no schooling until she sat the ACT at 17, argues that her father's refusal to send her to school was control dressed as protection, and calls Educated a defence of education as self-creation. Her narrower criticisms are of education as passive consumption and of teaching fifty people the same thing and then ranking them.","quote":"And control is not education.","quote_status":"well attested","quote_source":"Loeschner Leadership Lecture, Northwestern, 16 May 2023","attended_university":true,"taught_in_university":false,"supported_public_schooling":true,"would_tell_you_to_go":true,"sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Westover","https://sesp.northwestern.edu/news-events/sesp-news/2023/tara-westover-control-is-not-education.html"],"notes":"BYU BA 2008, Cambridge PhD 2014. Claimed by both regulate-homeschooling and unschooling camps; she rejects both readings."}]