Quotes About American Education

#1. While some American education experts may say that all learning should be 'fun,' I personally believe that the word "fun' is the wrong word to use. Learning should be challenging, meaningful, rigorous, engrossing, interesting, and satisfying.

Maya Thiagarajan

#2. I also think that there is a huge failure in the American education system to educate Americans about where we, our system, our government, came from. And to some extent this failure is shared in places like Britain and Canada and Australia.

Michael Scheuer

#3. Who was the founder of American education? John Dewey - you know that very well - card-carrying Communist. The American education system, in America - one of the so-called 'founders' was a Communist

Rafael Cruz

#4. The goal, I think, of American education, for decades, and across many, many scholars, was basically to teach people broad lessons in how to live life, how to engage life, how to essentially be effective citizens and effective people.

James Heckman

#5. We have a lot of rhetoric today about "high rigor" and you often hear terms like that thrown about when discussing the Common Core. But the American education system historically has not embraced intellectual seriousness.

Dana Goldstein

#6. American education is still the wonder of the world, and we must open the schoolhouse doors, not close them.

Lincoln Chafee

#7. In keeping Americans ill-educated, ill-informed and constitutionally ignorant, the education establishment has been the politician's major and most faithful partner. It is in this sense that American education can be deemed a success.

Walter E. Williams

#8. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

Thomas Jefferson

#9. One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#10. We are all concerned about the future of American education. But as I tell my students, you do not enter the future - you create the future. The future is created through hard work.

Jaime Escalante

#11. Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education.

Paul Erdos

#12. Like television, motion pictures, and computers, [Stephen] King has replaced reading ... the triumph of the genial King is a large emblem of the failures of American education.

Harold Bloom

#13. American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

Diane Ravitch

#14. Homeschool history tells of more than two centuries of home-teaching influence on American education, although it has been largely obscured by the drawn curtains of conventional bias.

Raymond S. Moore

#15. Got it. You're fourteen. I'm proud you can count that high. It's a testament to the modern American education system. But I should probable point out that you're not the only one. I'm told you go to a school with a whole class of-get this-kids who are fourteen.- Ash

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#16. In business, poor performance leads to bankruptcy or, at a minimum, a restructuring of the company. In American education, failure entitles the bankrupt system to even more taxpayer dollars.

Cal Thomas

#17. I'm not one of those who thinks the only way to fix what's wrong with American education is to throw more money at it. We also need to do it much better.

Robert Reich

#18. People will urge you to go to school. They'll tell you an American education is useful. That is not true. That is 80's. You are here to hustle.

E. C. Osondu

#19. MR. WEINGLASS: Between the date of your birth, November 30, 1936, and May 1, 1960, what if anything occurred in your life?
HOFFMAN: Nothing. I believe it is called an American education.
-from the Chicago 7 trial

Abbie Hoffman

#20. American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

Henry Adams

#21. The achievement of high universal literacy is the key to all other fundamental improvements in American education.

E.D. Hirsch Jr.

#22. As American education and intelligence becomes replaced by feelings and emotion, not seeing the forest for the trees has become a major problem.

Walter E. Williams

#23. The American education system couldn't be more badly directed or poorly funded if the Secretary of Education were Ed Wood.

Dennis Miller

#24. American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.

Diane Ravitch

#25. The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.

Diane Ravitch

#26. In my opinion, the greatest single failure of American education is that students come away unable to distinguish between a symbol and the thing the symbol stands for.

Paul Lutus

#27. Building new connections is a critical part of building a new economy. The American education system, as flawed as it is, is great for the creative class because of the way it mixes up networks.

Danah Boyd

#28. We don't reinvest in the American people. We don't put enough money into American education.

Jedediah Bila

#29. If you detect something mindless about American education, it's because the mind has been taken out of it. Only visible behavior counts.

Samuel L. Blumenfeld

#30. Every measurement of where you have more public confidence in creating jobs, American prosperity, controlling crime, health care, providing education, all of these standards, Bill Clinton has considerably high marks. The sole exception is on protecting taxes, which is initially his attack.

Mark Shields

#31. We are currently working on new policies to protect and create American jobs, particularly by improving education. We need more information in order to find the best solutions to this increasing concern for American families.

Dan Lipinski

#32. American tax dollars spent on education are meant to support students, not support aggressive, deceptive, and misleading marketing campaigns by certain for-profit education companies.

Sherrod Brown

#33. Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.

Jimmy Carter

#34. On many American campuses the only qualification for admission was the ability actually to find the campus and then discover a parking space.

Malcolm Bradbury

#35. Education is transformational. It changes lives. That is why people work so hard to become educated and why education has always been the key to the American Dream, the force that erases arbitrary divisions of race and class and culture and unlocks every person's God-given potential.

Condoleezza Rice

#36. It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the typical American college student lays waste his powers. Work and contemplation don't mix, and university days ought to be days of contemplation.

Russell Kirk

#37. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#38. The importance of these [college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him.

Allan Bloom

#39. Dad was a chemistry professor at Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, then Oxford College in Minnesota, and a very active member of the American Chemical Society education committee, where he sat on the committee with Linus Pauling, who had authored a very phenomenally important textbook of chemistry.

Peter Agre

#40. I think that the American people are curious about who a candidate is, what their background is, who their family is, what their faith experience has been, their education, their work experience. All of those are factors that voters look at because they want to take a measure of the individual.

Michele Bachmann

#41. You go to college not only for the latest knowledge but also to meet people from different backgrounds. That's the genius of the American higher-education system compared with the Europeans'. We don't simply skim the elite.

Donna Shalala

#42. Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.

Jan C. Ting

#43. equality. Qatar has adopted the Education City project, in which it has invited a collection of prestigious American universities to open up branches here in Doha. Some of these universities include Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service,

Carol Henderson

#44. The American dream means that you have the chance to work hard, get an education and do great things for yourself, for your kids. The great thing in American is it doesn't matter what your last name is, doesn't matter if you're wealthy.

Bobby Jindal

#45. The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.

Betty Friedan

#46. I started cooking seven years ago for real, and I started with pasta, and lasagna and roast chicken. Very normal American dishes. When I turned on Food Network, or any sort of cooking channel, that's what people were making. So that's where your education comes from.

Aarti Sequeira

#47. Community colleges are the great American invention in terms of education,

Eduardo J. Padron

#48. Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future.

Thad Cochran

#49. Education is not a luxury in modern American society-it is essential for survival.

John M. Perkins

#50. Unless we make education a priority, an entire generation of Americans could miss out on the American dream.

Blanche Lincoln

#51. The need for a college education is even more important now than it was before, but I think that the increased costs are a very severe obstacle to access. It is an American dream, and I think that one of our challenges is to find a way to make that available.

Roy Romer

#52. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

George Santayana

#53. I believe that it is higher education's purpose and calling to keep open the door to the American dream.

Gordon Gee

#54. Today there are a lot places where people say they're just hopeless. If I can come from a hopeless country, get an education, become a hyphenated American and become president of the World Bank, it's my moral duty to make sure that every single person on the planet has that opportunity.

Jim Yong Kim

#55. Fully 57 percent of American college students are women. Life insurance companies sell more policies to women than to men. As women continue to draw on experience and education, they're accelerating their numbers in upper management, too.

Suzanne Fields

#56. Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.

Bill Gates

#57. In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!

Spider Robinson

#58. The freedom to be able to offer education, human services, and health care in accordance with our own identity as a church should not be denied us simply because there may be the perception of a political majority who favors a new understanding of the American tradition of pluralism.

Donald Wuerl

#59. I think that one thing that people are missing is that we are never going to be able to fix this country's [American] economy in the long run until we fix our public education system.

Michelle Rhee

#60. Of all the errors which can possibly be committed to the education of youth, that of sending them to Europe is the most fatal. I see [clearly] that no American should come to Europe under 30 years of age.

Thomas Jefferson

#61. The secretary of education does not work for the education establishment. The secretary works for the American people.

William Bennett

#62. To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.

Carter G. Woodson

#63. The best way to improve the American workforce in the 21st century is to invest in early childhood education, to ensure that even the most disadvantaged children have the opportunity to succeed along side their more advantaged peers

James Heckman

#64. The rapid deterioration of education has been recognized as a national problem for the past several years. Consequently, American businesses must meet the immediate challenge of poorly-educated people in today's workforce by strengthening employee training programs.

Gregory Balestrero

#65. Dr. Margaret Oda, a true trailblazer in education, served as Honolulu school district superintendent and was the driving force behind the middle-school concept and the first chairwoman of the Japanese American National Museum.

Colleen Hanabusa

#66. I believe the American dream is still alive and that education and entrepreneurship together are its key enablers. Through the years I have observed the power of this combination when the two forces work in tandem. Together they lead to personal success, business success, and societal success.

Ralph De La Vega

#67. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Ishmael Reed

#68. If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.

John Hope

#69. Jeff Selingo is one of the most respected observers of American higher education ... Not all will agree with his observations, conclusions, predictions and recommendations, but all will gain from this thoughtful, well-written, provocative volume. I highly recommend it.

David J. Skorton

#70. I think it's a right that every American parent should have - choice and competition in education, and choice in schools are most important to me.

Cindy McCain

#71. If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.

Janet Napolitano

#72. I am here to give the American people some straight talk about higher education. Some have said we might have cut financial aid for college students. The truth is we have expanded access to college for our neediest students through the record growth of the Pell grant program.

Ric Keller

#73. Immigration is not the top issue for Latinos. Latinos are like every other American - economy, jobs, healthcare, education.

Eva Longoria

#74. Shoot, I must have lived such a doggoned sheltered life as a normal, independent American up there in the Last Frontier, schooled with only public education and a lowly state university degree, because obviously I haven't learned enough to dismiss common sense.

Sarah Palin

#75. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Barack Obama

#76. The plain, unvarnished truth is that public education is a shoddy, fraudulent piece of goods sold t to the public at an astronomical price. It's time the American consumer knew the extent of the fraud which is victimizing millions of children each year.

Samuel Blumenfeld

#77. The cognitive skills prized by the American educational establishment and measured by achievement tests are only part of what is required for success in life. Character skills are equally important determinants of wages, education, health and many other significant aspects of flourishing lives.

James Heckman

#78. The American system of education, in its incipiency, and for a long while, was one founded on Bible-teaching and religious exercises. The present system is un-American, anti-American.

Michael Mueller

#79. American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.

Ishmael Reed

#80. Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.

Kurt Vonnegut

#81. As we get closer to the end of this Congress, we should be addressing the urgent needs of the American people - the war in Iraq, affordable health care, a sensible energy policy, quality education for our children, retirement security, and a sound and fair fiscal policy.

Chris Van Hollen

#82. Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.

Richard Mitchell

#83. I literally believe that when it comes to Education, the fate of the rectification & preservation of Science is in the hands of the American children; if we want to see Science flourishes worldwide, we must invest more in those kids.

Ibrahim Ibrahim

#84. The takeover of Harvard in 1805 by the Unitarians is probably the most important intellectual event in American history - at least from the standpoint of education

Samuel Blumenfeld

#85. In the US, the problem is primary and secondary education. We've had such an increase in inequality because a quarter of American kids don't finish high school!

Milton Friedman

#86. The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the pre-eminence of family.

Mitt Romney

#87. What we see today is an American economy that has boomed because of policies and developments of the 1950s and '60s: the interstate-highway system, massive funding for science and technology, a public-education system that was the envy of the world and generous immigration policies.

Fareed Zakaria

#88. Nothing brings more money to the Treasury of the United States, than investment in education of the American people.

Nancy Pelosi

#89. American Conservatives maintain that the finished character of a grown man is mainly due to congenital characteristics, while American Radicals maintain, on the contrary, that education is everything and heredity nothing. I cannot agree with either of these two extreme positions, nor

Bertrand Russell

#90. Let's focus on how we can take someone who is being poorly educated in an American public school and how they are poorly trained for a job, and put in place those opportunities for them to get that education, give their parents choice in education, make it real for them.

Michael Steele

#91. Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

Jane Jacobs

#92. The American Dream is not being dependent on the federal government for your health care, for your automobile, for your college education, for your student loan on and on and on.

Marsha Blackburn

#93. Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

Gore Vidal

#94. The American dream always meant that anybody willing to put in a hard day's work could make a decent living. That's just not true anymore for people without at least some post-high school education.

Adam Davidson

#95. I went to Parsons. American sportswear was my education, and that is what is important to me.

Chris Benz

#96. See, that's why Barack's running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly - to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American - and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class education all the way from preschool to college.

Michelle Obama

#97. When it comes to college education, American families are paying more and getting less.

Patricia Schroeder

#98. Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

John Mason Brown

#99. In the years since then, those four freedoms - freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear - have stood as a summary of our aspirations for the American Republic and for the world.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#100. I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

Anson Mount