Quotes About Public Education

#1. The left has total control over the public education system, all the way up to the university level. It's something they own, and it's going to have to change.

Rush Limbaugh

#2. The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side. They're trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

Maureen Dowd

#3. Public education is a good foundation on which to build a better life for each of us. And if we want to prove to these children who never made the mess in the first place that education is worth the trouble, our schools have to inspire them so they can do what they ought to do.

Bill Cosby

#4. Racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional ... All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.

Earl Warren

#5. I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something.

Dave Barry

#6. As a senator from the only true swing district in the Texas Senate, I've been targeted by the GOP for my outspoken criticism of their extremist attacks on public education and voting rights, to name just two examples.

Wendy Davis

#7. Public education grants secular worldviews an exclusive monopoly in the classroom.

Nancy Pearcey

#8. It's hard to improve public education - that's clear.

Bill Gates

#9. All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

Ben Shahn

#10. Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.

Fareed Zakaria

#11. Public education is so important - resisting privatization and charterization, high-stakes testing, and defunding. It's important for New York, but it's also important for the country.

Zephyr Teachout

#12. It would be difficult to find in the United States any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education.

Kevin D. Williamson

#13. Teach For America provides one of the most critical pipelines for bringing new talent into public education.

Eli Broad

#14. In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#15. Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

Jonathan Kozol

#16. Instead of unfairly demonizing teachers, we should be working with them to find solutions to the problems in our schools and make sure every child gets an outstanding public education.

Albio Sires

#17. The public library is a center of public happiness first, of public education next.

John Cotton Dana

#18. Everything that we believe in and count on is really in question right now. Our safety net, public education, housing, health care, so many things that are fundamental to a healthy democracy, are under attack. So I think, in general we've got a lot of work to do.

Ai-jen Poo

#19. No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.

Carl Hiaasen

#20. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H.L. Mencken

#21. A democratic form of government, a democratic way of life, presupposes free public education over a long period; it presupposes also an education for personal responsibility that too often is neglected.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#22. 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

#23. Evolution is not controversial in the field of science. It's controversial in the public sphere because public education is highly politicized.

Eugenie Scott

#24. The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us who hold to the original traditions of our nation. To change these traditions by changing our traditional attitude toward public education would be harmful, I think, to our whole attitude of tolerance in the religious area.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#25. We have seen a central government taking more and more control over public education, over communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.

Robert W. Welch Jr.

#26. The main element of true reconciliation is the public education system.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#27. The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement ... We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America.

Pat Robertson

#28. We need excellence in public education and if the teachers can't do it, we'll send in a couple of policemen.

Frank Rizzo

#29. The debt is being cynically exploited by the far right, with collusion of the Democrat establishment, to undermine what remains of social programs, public education, unions, and, in general, remaining barriers to corporate tyranny.

Noam Chomsky

#30. The private schools and the independent schools like Oprah's are really doing well because they've got the best of everything but it certainly puts the spotlight on a system of public education that is still reeling from the apartheid years [in South Africa].

Charlayne Hunter-Gault

#31. 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

#32. Reforming public education, cutting property taxes, fixing adult and child protective services and funding our budget can all occur when Democrats and Republicans engage in consensus and cooperation - not cynicism and combat.

Rick Perry

#33. Public education has served as a check on the power of parents, and this is another powerful reason for maintaining it.

John Goodlad

#34. If we get public education right, everything else will follow. But if we get it wrong, not much else will matter.

Steve Kagen

#35. You look at public education system, charter schools, infrastructure, in so many ways New Orleans has come back stronger.

Drew Brees

#36. 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

#37. In the Brown decision, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the legal and moral footing of racially segregated public education in this country.

Bobby Scott

#38. You can't just provide power, you also need public education.

Zephyr Teachout

#39. The rascal multitude are the proper targets of the mass media and a public education system geared to obedience and training in needed skills, including the skill of repeating patriotic slogans on timely occasions.

Noam Chomsky

#40. You can't have public health without working with the public sector. You can't have public education without working with the public sector in education.

Paul Farmer

#41. I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

Andrew Cuomo

#42. 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

#43. Today's public education system is a failed monopoly: bureaucratic, rigid and in unsteady control of dissatisfied captive markets.

David T. Kearns

#44. I look back and see the kids who made it through school - it made a huge difference in their lives, which made me believe in the power of public education and what it can do for individuals and communities and the state.

Denise Juneau

#45. All I suggest is to make K-12 like higher education. Higher education in the United States is the best in the world because these institutions compete with each other for your tuition dollar. Let's just bring competition to public education.

Gary Johnson

#46. All you've got to do is go back and look in the early 1900s and see what we had in Texas without public education and realize what it has done for the state.

Pete Laney

#47. Our public education system does a great job. I don't think it's broken. We aren't interested in doing reform for reform's sake. I believe in public education; it did a great job for me. It deserves our support and encouragement.

Denise Juneau

#48. Because as Europe and the United States become more diverse, it creates an anxiety, a racial anxiety, that is reflected in declining support for public space, public institutions, public infrastructure, and public education.

John A. Powell

#49. Public education is an investment in our future.

Matt Blunt

#50. We're throwing money down a rat hole drain of public education! We lead the world in public education spending. We lead the world in getting the least for it.

Rush Limbaugh

#51. You've got to have a good public education system so small-business owners, when they locate to an area, are confident their kids are getting the best education possible. I feel strongly about local control in school districts.

Jon Tester

#52. 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

#53. All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting discrimination in public education must yield.

Earl Warren

#54. Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.

David Souter

#55. In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education.

Camille Paglia

#56. I'm a proponent of single-payer health-care, public education, protecting the environment - all the things Democrats rally around.

Cynthia Dill

#57. So if you want to find somebody to blame for the way i am, I guess you'd have to start with the public education system.

Jeff Kinney

#58. Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.

Eleanor Roosevelt

#59. You can't create a successful politics of support for public education on the basis of asking voters not to care about skills, and tests that measure skills, at all.

Nicholas Lemann

#60. Direct popular government of a state larger than a city state had already failed therefore in Italy, because as yet there was no public education, no press, and no representative system; it had failed though these mere mechanical difficulties, before the first Punic War.

H.G.Wells

#61. In the economy today, everybody understands that we need a well educated workforce. This is 2016. When we talk about public education, it can no longer be K through 12th grade. I do believe that public colleges and universities should be tuition free.

Bernie Sanders

#62. Future public education will require involvement and collaboration among various local, civic, private and nonprofit entities, a concept I like to refer to as 'community entrepreneurship.'

Donald Bren

#63. We stand in the shadow of Jefferson who believed that a society founded upon the rule of law and liberty was dependent upon public education and the diffusion of knowledge.

Matt Blunt

#64. We need to end the government monopoly in education by transferring power from bureaucracies and unions to families. The era of defining public education as allegiance to centralized school districts must end.

Jeb Bush

#65. Health care is not a privilege. It's a right. It's a right as fundamental as civil rights. It's a right as fundamental as giving every child a chance to get a public education.

Rod Blagojevich

#66. I had been hoping and waiting for some mind-blowingly fantastic, world-altering event to finally shatter the endless monotony of my public education.

Ernest Cline

#67. While the romanticized ideal of universal public education resonates with the cognoscenti who oppose vouchers, poor urban families just want the best education for their children, who will certainly need it to function in our high-tech and advanced society.

Clarence Thomas

#68. I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids' public education better.

Sarah Palin

#69. Rather than squander the surplus on tax breaks for the rich, we should add a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program, shore up Social Security, fortify our defense, provide a quality public education and offer economic assistance to rural areas.

Bennie Thompson

#70. Education to me is the most important thing that we've got going in this country. I mean, a lot of my family are teachers. I was the recipient of a great public education, and I see that's one of the first things that we're going to go, 'What are we going to raise?' The ignorant masses.

Craig T. Nelson

#71. Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

Jonathan Kozol

#72. After a sound public education, I attended Penn and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After being drafted into the military and studying Indonesian, I emerged as a writer, not a painter.

Allan Gurganus

#73. I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.

Mitch Kapor

#74. There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.

Thomas Jefferson

#75. Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

Bryan Stevenson

#76. I think Democrats are right. We fight for the American dream, for the environment, for privacy rights, a woman's right to choose, a good public education system.

Barbara Boxer

#77. In the U.S., we believe the best way to improve lives is to improve public education.

Bill Gates

#78. We're first on executions. We're 49th in funding public education. We're in a race with Mississippi for the bottom, and we're winning.

Kinky Friedman

#79. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place.

Earl Warren

#80. As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.

Christopher Moore

#81. Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.

Scott Turow

#82. We are afraid to face the hard questions. We are willing to tackle drugs, crime, and public education only if it doesn't cost us any new taxes.

J. Irwin Miller

#83. I am not a patient person. My friends and colleagues will confirm this. But, frankly, we should all feel a little more impatient with the state of public education in America today.

Eli Broad

#84. All democracies demand common public education because nothing makes people so much alike as the same education.

Karl Jaspers

#85. It is now quite obvious that the humanists are using public education as the battering ram with which to destroy Christianity in the United States.

Samuel Blumenfeld

#86. I am and have always been a strong proponent of public education. But by the virtue of its very nature - publicly funded schools cannot offer the type of spiritual education that Catholic schools have long provided.

Mark Foley

#87. If you want to know how to solve society's problems, you start out with better public education.

Michael Bloomberg

#88. To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Timothy Noah

#89. An attack on Public Education is an attack on Democracy

Diane Ravitch

#90. While NCLB drove important progress on transparency and data disaggregation, I think it's clear that the status quo in public education is not working for our kids or our country.

Michael Bennet

#91. I am very proud of the quality of public education in Nebraska, but I believe we have an obligation to continually assess whether our system is meeting 21st Century education needs.

Dave Heineman

#92. As a school board we felt it's an unfair expense to families. The lawsuit has a certain logic to it - if you have free public education, you can't put these things on top of it. It defeats the purpose.

Steve Martin

#93. I've been an advocate for public education for a long time. It's the way people are able to improve their lives.

Mary Burke

#94. It just felt like the right thing to do to give back to a state school and public school. I'm a really big fan of public education.

Brendan Iribe

#95. It defies reason to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would march arm in arm with Wall Street hedge fund managers and members of ALEC to lead a struggle for the privatization of public education, the crippling of unions, and the establishment of for-profit schools.

Diane Ravitch

#96. Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform.

Ken Robinson

#97. In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education.

Russell Means

#98. I wasn't going to great schools, because my parents didn't believe in public education. They wanted the education to be influenced by their religion, so I was going to these halfway education-slash-Christian schools that were like pop-up shop-style education.

Katy Perry

#99. Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

May Sarton

#100. Public health service should be as fully organized and as universally incorporated into our governmental system as is public education. The returns are a thousand fold in economic benefits, and infinitely more in reduction of suffering and promotion of human happiness.

Herbert Hoover