What's gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.

A lot of the strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own minds. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants, but there isn't any way to punish a large number of deviants. It's too expensive to even try. So, the solution is to colonize the minds of children as they're growing up, so that they become their own police, and to report on others who are deviating.

Is it any wonder that Socrates was outraged at the accusation he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, that of pre-empting the teaching function, which, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.