School Quotes

The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.

~ Jacques Rancière

School was my solace, and studying let me escape, allowing me to live a thousand vicarious lives.

~ Sarah Dessen

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract.

~ Pete Townshend

We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils

~ Jostein Gaarder

School’s important at the moment.Unsexiest statement ever.

~ A.s. King

It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted.

~ Sonia Sotomayor

Because this is Upper Canada, after all, and 'caning' sounds more English than 'having ass whipped to death with hickory stick.

~ Allan Dare Pearce

It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.

~ B.j. Novak

With homework, school prepares students for overtime. With reports, it prepares them for payday.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In a setting of formal education, one would imagine that abstract thought would be encouraged, and that questioning obvious errors within the current system wouldn’t be frowned upon. Wrong again; these cunts are out to protect their pocket books and paradigms.

~ Scott Parker

Josh Funk and Hunter Fraser: we haven't been in touch in years, but you made me feel like the funniest kid in the world. I would stay up late on school nights to write things to try to make you laugh the next day in class, and you inspired the one piece of advice on writing that I've ever felt qualified to give: write for the kid sitting next to you.

~ B.j. Novak

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

~ Sara Sheridan

This school is enough to make anyone a communist.

~ Jo Walton

The trouble with school is they give you the answer, then they give you the exam. That's not life....

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

He looked at me with a smile that I still remember and ran a finger along his impeccably trimmed mustache. “Cricket is about a lot more than playing by the rules, Mistry. It’s a gentleman’s game. Don’t you ever forget that.

~ Ken Doyle

The more time I spent at the Finches', the more I realized what a waste of my life this school crap was. It was nothing but a holding tank for kids without bigger plans or ideas.

~ Augusten Burroughs

I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry?

~ Neel Burton

School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

In a traditional classroom, the spread between the fastest and slowest students grows over time, [and so] putting them all in one class cohort eventually makes it exceedingly difficult to avoid either completely boring the fast students or completely losing the slow ones. Most school systems address this by... putting the fastest students in advanced or gifted class... and the slowest students into remedial classes. It seems logical... except for the fact that it creates a somewhat permanent intellectual and social division between students.

~ Salman Khan

Within the grand scale of things, sitting in a classroom day after day is so utterly meaningless and pointless that it actually makes his chest hurt to think about it.

~ Tabitha Suzuma

The saddest thing I have ever experienced is watching a fellow nerd I've known forever and befriended, trying to unnerdify themselves. It was painful because that great geeky personality I loved so much is hidden behind a plaster of trends, and he may end up with a girl who will never understand him.

~ Melanie Kay Taylor

School means work and work means death. Let's all go take a nap.

~ Emma Shannon

You're weird,' she said. 'You don't have any friends.''I didn't come here for friends,' said Bod truthfully. i came here to learn.'Mo's nose twitched. Do you know how weird that is?' she asked. Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to.

~ Neil Gaiman

School is a pile of crap. School has always been a pile of crap – he had just never bothered to think about it until today.

~ Tabitha Suzuma

Earlier in the summer, I'd found the syllabi to a couple of the courses I was taking at Defriese in the fall, and I'd hunted down a few of the texts at the U bookstore, figuring it couldn't hurt to acquaint myself with the material.

~ Sarah Dessen

Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state.

~ Katherine Stewart

Yet that is considered an excellent school, and I dare say it would be if the benighted lady did not think it necessary to cram her pupils like Thanksgiving turkeys, instead of feeding them in a natural and wholesome way. It is the fault with most American schools, and the poor little heads will go on aching till we learn better.

~ Louisa May Alcott

To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

So here's the deal: I speak up in class, I get sent to office. Megan speaks up in class, she's a strong, assertive model student.I post a few flyers saying that the vending machines on school property are a sign that our school has sold out to corporate-industrial establishment, I get (what else?) Saturday detention. Megan starts a campaign to serve local foods in the lunchroom (oh, and can we please maybe get rid of the soda machines?) and the local newspaper does a write-up about her.She's like me, only not. Not like me at all. She's the golden girl and I'm...tarnished. So forgive me if I hate her a little.

~ Katie Alender

A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there.

~ John Green

School forces unique individuals to think, act, and, look alike.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.

~ Carsten Jensen

School overpopulates students’ minds with too much of what happened yesterday; seldom with what the students can do today, or, tomorrow.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.

~ Neil Postman

You don’t really need to be intelligent to be a 'top student.' All that you have to do is to forget the least in an exam.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We have lunch at ten-forty-five,” Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period.

~ Rebecca Stead

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.

~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

The argument could be made that the word 'hero' is overused. I do not think, however, that this is the case when referring to teachers.

~ Steve Maraboli

I don't know what's worse, being ignored or stared at.

~ Renata Suerth