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ideal of educating young children in history as they will become the very "guardians of their own liberty" has been replaced by the students learning how they fit into their schools and their communities; knowledge, the integration of facts into an understanding of the greater world,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.