The Myth of the School - I

“Education is not something which the teacher does ... it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being”  -Maria Montessori 

“You may give them your love, but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you ... you are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth ...” 
-from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran 

“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think” 
-Socrates 


“What generally happens is that guardians become so tired taking care of the child that they feel a great burden lifted from their shoulders when the child goes to school... they think ‘I would be happier if the child were away for a while’ but they only think so because they do not know what a great opportunity it is to begin to train and guide a child. It is an opportunity for its whole life and if a guardian misses it, it means a loss to the child.” 
-from The Sufi Message of Inyat Khan, Vol III

“There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects,more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. In prison they may torture your body but they do not torture your brains”
-George Bernard Shaw

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”
-Mark Twain

“Children who are forced to eat acquire a loathing for food and children who are forced to learn acquire a loathing for knowledge”
-Bertrand Russell

“From my grandfather’s father, (I learned) to dispense with attendance at public schools and to enjoy good teachers at home and to recognise that on such things money should be eagerly spent”
-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Roman Emperor 2nd Century AD)

“My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school” -Margaret Mead

“What are you educated for, anyway? You may be a sociologist, an anthropologist, or a scientist, with your specialised mind working away at a fragment of the whole field of life. You are filled with knowledge and words, with capable explanations and rationalisations. And perhaps in the future the computer will be able to do all this infinitely better than you can.”
- J Krishnamurti

“So education may have a different meaning altogether - not merely transferring what is printed on a page to your brain. Education may mean opening the doors of perception to the vast movement of life. It may mean learning how to live happily, freely, without hate and confusion but in beatitude. Modern education is blinding us: we learn to fight each other more and more, to compete, to struggle with each other. Right education is surely finding a different way of life, setting the mind free of its own conditioning. And perhaps there can be love which in its action will bring about true relationship between man and man” from Five Conversations
-by J Krishnamurti

Sourced from www.altenativeeducationindia.net and elsewhere 

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