In fact, healthy students often redouble their resistance to teaching as they find themselves more comprehensively manipulated. This resistance is due not to the authoritarian style of a public school or the seductive style of some free schools, but to the fundamental approach common to all schools-the idea that one person's judgment should determine what and when another person must learn. Ivan Illich
About This Quote

The above statement was written in 1971 by Philip Selznick, a former U.S. school administrator and teacher in the late 60s and 70s. The idea of "undue influence" is one of the most common criticisms of public education, and it is certainly true that we live in a world where we are bombarded with messages telling us how to think, what to believe, who to love, how to act - every day. As Phil Selznick points out, "if these messages are not relevant to you, you are likely to get annoyed at them.

But if they are relevant, you may not realize it. But then you will be just as likely to accept them."

Source: Deschooling Society

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Because I trust in the ever-changing climate of the heart. (At least, today I feel that way.) I think it is necessary to have many experiences for the sake of feeling something; for the sake of being challenged, and for the sake of being expressive,... - Jason Mraz
  2. The past has no power over the present moment. - Eckhart Tolle
  3. It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. - Confucius
  4. Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be. - Heath L. Buckmaster
  5. Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. - John Lubbock
More Quotes By Ivan Illich
  1. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it, " yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
  2. School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
  3. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
  4. We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only -- 'to learn' becomes 'to accumulate credits'.
  5. Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid...
Related Topics