"The objective of getting all school-aged children to school and keeping them there until they attain the minimum defined in compulsory education is routinely used in the sector of education,
but this objective does not necessarily conform to human rights requirements. In a country where all school-aged children are in school, free of charge, for the full duration of compulsory education, the right to education may be denied or violated. The core human rights standards for education include respect of freedom.
The respect of parents' freedom to educate their children according to their vision of what education should be has been part of international human rights standards since their very emergence."
-Statement by Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1999."We were making the future," he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.
And here it is!-The Sleeper Awakes, H. G. Wells, 1910."Education...now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind.
It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators and 'fans', driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy and fear. My concern is
not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people shaping and
help people to shape themselves."
-John Holt, Instead of Education, quoted in Growing Without Education, GWS issue 30, page 29."The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental."
-Joel Spring, Education and the rise of the corporate state, 1969, page 45.
"During the twentieth century U. S. children's opportunities to observe and participate in mature activities have been greatly curtailed. In the colonial period the
workplace and the home were typically not separated, and young children participated skillfully in family work as well as community social events...As industry replaced farming, opportunities declined for children to learn work skills at home...At the beginning of the 1900s child labor laws were introduced in the U.S. to protect children from exploitation in factories.
As industrialization spread, school was made compulsory and the amount of time spent in school increased. This further limited U. S. children's opportunities to participate in the mature activities of their families and communities. Schools began to serve a wider segment of the child population as a
specialized child-focused setting that provided exercises to get children ready for later 'real world' work, generally without direct contact with actual mature activity...
These specialized child-focused situations- especially schooling, but also pre-school lessons and child-focused conversations in families - often employ instructional practices and a concept of learning that were heavily influenced by the organization of factories..."
-Barbara Rogoff, et al., Firsthand learning through intent participation, Annual review of psychology, 54(1), 2003, page 178."What is at stake here is to recognize that the act of knowing is more than a technical issue, it is, in part a political issue.
Knowing is not a matter of the best way to learn a given body of knowledge, but a theoretical-practical issue designed to distinguish between essence and appearance, truth and falsity. Knowledge parading under the guise of objectivity, has for far too long been used to legitimate belief and value systems that are at the core of bondage...Reality...is something other than that which is codified in the established language and 'facts'.
Liberation begins with the recognition that knowledge, at its root, is ideological and political, inextricably tied to human interests and norms."
-Henry A. Giroux, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, 1981, page 131.Tejeda, C., Espinoza, M., & Gutierrez, K. (2003).
Toward a decolonizing pedagogy: Social justice reconsidered. Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social change, 9-38.
"Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take,
pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error.
It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult - by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures."
-John Taylor Gatto, The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher, 1991."The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
-Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, 1968, page 168.
