A Quote by H. L. Mencken

[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H. L. Mencken

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Aim Assumption Awaken Breed Citizenry Citizenship Could Discharge Dissent Down Duties Education Effect Enlightened Enlightenment Fill Fit Further Independent Individuals Intelligence Knowledge Level Make Manner Many Nothing Originality Possible Public Public Education Put Reduce Safe Same Simply Species Spread Them Train Truth Young

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H. L. Mencken
American - Writer
September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H. L. Mencken

Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship... When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.

Scott Turow

The demise of higher education as a public good is also evident in light of the election of a number of right-wing politicians who are cutting funds for state universities and doing everything they can to turn them in training centers to fill the needs of corporations. This new and intense attack on both the social state and higher education completely undermines the public nature of what education is all about.

Henry Giroux

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education — or that the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.

John Dewey

The ultimate aim of education is to enable individuals to become the architects of their own education and through that process to continually reinvent themselves.

Elliot W. Eisner

The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals.

Marlon Brando

All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education.

Karl Jaspers

The aim of education is to guide young persons in the process through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.

Jacques Maritain

I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to "educate them to keep them from our throats," to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.

Noam Chomsky

One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious... Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.

Dalai Lama

Training and education is one and the same: that is, to train the mind through a discipline in order to awake the inner intelligence of the individuals.

Lobsang Tenzin

But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study.

Aristotle

The process of education takes place in the field of consciousness; the prerequisite to complete education is therefore the full development of consciousness - enlightenment. Knowledge is not the basis of enlightenment, enlightenment is the basis of knowledge.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The whole idea of a public education was to train young people about how our system of government works, so they could be good citizens and be part of it. We're not doing that today.

Sandra Day O'Connor

Work is the greatest means of education. To train children to work, to work systematically, to love work, and to put their brains into work, may be called the end and aim of schools. In education, no work should be done for the sake of the thing done, but for the sake of the growing mind.

Francis Wayland Parker

A Quote by H. L. Mencken

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