Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.

Anyone who is more interested in human beings than in the rules is a threat to the system.

Creative work and critical thought, which produces new knowledge, can't be conditioned; indeed, conditioning prevents these things from ever happening.

School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.

...good things happen to the human spirit when it is left alone.