Liberty Quotes: Education

For the past year or so, I have been receiving one, two, sometimes three quotations about liberty in my inbox each morning courtesy of Liberty Quotes. Some I've heard before, some I don't really understand the context in which it was said (a problem with receiving only the pithy parts), and some really hit home. My favorites are the ones I've never heard before from the infamous. Today's are so good I needed to share them all:

Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-- Josef Stalin
(1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR



The education of all children,from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.
-- Karl Marx
(1818- 1883) Father of Communism, Author of the 'Communist Manifesto'
Source: The Communist Manifesto


Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin[Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870 - 1924), First Leader of the Soviet Union

The problem with government school is that its customers - those who must be satisfied in order to be a successful endeavor -  are not the parents of the children they educate, nor even the children themselves, but the prevailing political and pedagogical ideologues. The Jeffersonian ideal of educating young children in history as they will become the very "guardians of their own liberty" has been replaced by the students learning how they fit into their schools and their communities; knowledge, the integration of facts into an understanding of the greater world, has been replaced with social awareness as the measure of a successful student. 

No one disputes the importance of education, merely many of us see it as too important to leave to the whims, - or worse, program - of government. 

Liberty Quotes found through Beth, I think. 

Comments

HaynesBE said…
I've been so busy lately I have just been archiving my Liberty Quote emails. thanks for posting these.

I bet they all said similar things about health care.
April 14, 2011 at 7:15 PM
Jim said…
Excellent post.
April 17, 2011 at 10:54 PM
Liberty quotes said…
Supper compilation about liberty quotes. Thanks for sharing!!
November 4, 2015 at 11:55 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plainsies, Clapsies

A ball bouncing game from my youth instructed the player to throw the ball up ( plainsies ), throw it up and clap ( clapsies ) throw it up and roll your hands ( roll the ball ) and touch your shoulders ( tabapsies ). In trying to locate the rest of the ball bouncing chant, I found out not only is my “tabapsies” a mondegreen , but also the motion – touching your shoulders – isn’t even the correct movement! You are supposed to clap your hands behind your back and say “ to backsies .”  Yeah. That makes much more sense. Being only slightly deflated by this discovery, I will still share my exciting news.  In an attempt to counteract the stretching of my wrist from doing front squats two days in a row, I pulled out the tabapsies motion this morning.  This, in itself, is not newsworthy.  However, I grabbed both shoulders with all five fingers!!! Again, not exciting unless you know that when I was nine years-old, I broke my left elbow doing a running c...
Read more

Memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution

Image
In preparation for celebrating the 222nd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States on September 17, 1787, here are a few videos that I hope will inspire you to at least memorize the brief, but powerful Preamble. First, here is my first attempt at video editing with the bare bones Windows Movie Maker (no ability to step through frame by frame with sound, or ability to mark stops before cutting). My daughters are reading the Preamble to the Constitution from the little book I carry in my purse. They can recite it by heart, but it I thought it would be a little different (and a little less exposed) if they did it this way. Let's not even talk about the 20 takes due to laughter. If you knew it as a child, don't worry, it'll come back to you as Barney shows in this video. Finally, a little treat for my sci-fi loving friends. And if memorizing and reciting The Preamble in creative ways leaves you wanting more, you can find out which Founding Father you...
Read more

Why I am an Objectivist

I am a human being who values her life on this earth above all other things. The right and good is that which contributes to my life and the wrong and evil is that which destroys it. Every action I take must pass through the gates of identification before being pursued as a value which I understand will contribute to my life. Happiness is my ultimate goal. I understand the importance of identifying, applying, pursuing, and achieving those values which will contribute to my life, not just in the immediate sense (which every child understands), but in the long-term sense (which develops with experience). This is not to say that I’m really good at always identifying, pursuing, and achieving those values, or that I remain consistent in my applications of them; merely that I had already understood that this selfishness was the key to my happiness when I was relatively young. The importance of the fact that I understood I was responsible for my own happiness can not be overemphasized here. W...
Read more