Great Throughts Treasury

"Competition, the wringing of success from somebody’s failure."

"The schools have never been places for the stimulation of young minds. If all through school the young were provoked to question the Ten Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of patriotism, the profit motive, the two-party system, monogamy, the laws of incest, and so on, we would have more creativity than we could handle."

"School is an institution for drilling children in cultural orientation. ...American classrooms, like educational institutions anywhere, express the values, preoccupations,and fears found in the culture as a whole. School has no choice; it must train the children to fit the culture as it is. ...Since education is always against some things and for others, it bears the burden of the cultural obessions. ...It thus comes about that most educational systems are imbued with anxiety and hostility, that they are against as many things as they are for. ... The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them...acquiescence, not originality. ...Schools are the central conserving force of the culture. "

"If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!"