Quotes About The Public School

#1. I believe in the support of the public school as one of the cornerstones of American liberty. I believe in the right of every parent to choose whether his child shall be educated in the public school or in a religious school supported by those of his own faith.

Al Smith

#2. I sincerely believe that the collective efforts of many secularists during the past generation, resulting in the expulsion from our schools and from the public square, has left us vulnerable.

Jerry Falwell

#3. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#4. 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

#5. Precious souls as young as three or four, raised on the misplaced multicultural priorities of Sesame Street," he claims, "are doomed before they even enter the godless morass of the public school system.

Chuck Palahniuk

#6. I'm used to a very busy schedule. Right now it revolves around training and preparing for Nationals in January. I'm usually at the rink from 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. and then I attend public school for two hours, three times per week.

Sasha Cohen

#7. Another example of the educational inequality is the current debate over publicly financed school vouchers which will provide educational opportunities to a privileged handful, but deprive public schools of desperately needed resources.

Bobby Scott

#8. Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?

Jacques Barzun

#9. My education began in the public schools of Wilmington. During most of these years, from about age 10, I also worked at some job or other after school, on weekends, and in the summer months.

Daniel Nathans

#10. The situation was much as if some profit-making organizations had grafted themselves upon the public-school system.

George R. Stewart

#11. The Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life ... The Bible ... should be read in our schools in preference to all other books because it contains the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public happiness.

Benjamin Rush

#12. Charters give public school teachers the flexibility to design programs to the individual student needs. They no longer have to go to a distant bureaucracy to ask for permission. By being allowed to make their own decisions the teachers are able to create strong partnerships with parents.

Gary Larson

#13. As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself.

Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

#14. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.

Paul Krugman

#15. Vaccination is a public health issue because influenza is a highly contagious disease. If you don't vaccinate your child, his or her schoolmates are much more likely to become ill. That is why some places (New York, for example) are making the vaccine mandatory for school children.

Michael Specter

#16. What a tremendous act of generosity on the part of the donors who made this possible and what a tremendous opportunity for all these children in Kalamazoo public schools who can now go to college and chase their dreams.

Jennifer Granholm

#17. You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.

Charlie Munger

#18. The public schools are supported entirely, in most communities, by public funds-funds exacted not only from parents, nor alone from those who hold particular religious views, nor indeed from those who subscribe to any creed at all.

William J. Brennan

#19. Together, the property rights and public choice schools show only that, if you start by assuming a purely individualistic model of human behavior and treat politics as if it were a pale imitation of the market, democracy will, indeed, make no sense.

Paul Starr

#20. Your children will go to public school and they will be trained for somewhere around 15,000 hours in ungodly secular thought. And then they'll go to Sunday school and they'll color a picture of Noah's ark. And you think that's going to stand against the lies that they are being told?

Paul Washer

#21. I believe the public schools are the greatest cultural influence in this country.

Phyllis Schlafly

#22. Some 'separation' zealots would expunge any vestige of religious observance in public schools. Many of the same anti-religious fanatics would like to wipe out of existence all church-related schools, by regulation or taxation, so that universal ignorance of the life of spirit should prevail.

Russell Kirk

#23. The public school system is damned. Let me tell you how radical I am. Christian students should be in Christian schools. If you have to sell your car, live in a smaller house, or work a night job, put your child in Christian schools. If you can't afford it, homeschool.

Jerry Falwell

#24. My hesitation to send Lotus to public school was not based on the caliber of the teachers. It stemmed from the very nature of conventional education.

Cari Donaldson

#25. I attended the public schools.And I have happy memories and strong memories of those days and good memories of the good sense and the decency of my friends and my neighbors.

Samuel Alito

#26. The lines marking a penalty area are a disgrace to the playing fields of a public school.

Christopher Fry

#27. Anybody who knows the public school teacher world (knows) there's not a lot of money in teaching. You do it because you love what you do.

Kevin Sorbo

#28. We had representatives of most every ethnic group in the public school, and I always felt that this gave me a sense of balance about those ethnic problems that was useful to me in later life, and particularly in political life.

Prescott Bush

#29. I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.

Jonathan Demme

#30. If you want a good education, go to private schools. If you can't afford it, tough luck. You can go to the public school.

Paul LePage

#31. The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.

Mary Antin

#32. Taxes are how we pool our money for public health and safety, infrastructure, research, and services-from the development of vaccines and the Internet to public schools and universities, transportation, courts, police, parks, and safe drinking water.

Holly Sklar

#33. We left my birthplace, Brooklyn, New York, in 1939 when I was 13. I enjoyed the ethnic variety and the interesting students in my public school, P.S. 134. The kids in my neighborhood were only competitive in games, although unfriendly gangs tended to define the limits of our neighborhood.

Irwin Rose

#34. If prayer is to leave the public schools, let the ridicule of prayer leave also.

Boyd K. Packer

#35. Close examination of the evidence shows that the poor were being included in private education, and only those who did not want to go to school were missing out. There was no need for public school except as a tool to undermine the church's influence in education.

Gregg Harris

#36. My hobby is to make up these "false stories". The stories that I create impact the public in a completely different form... It's enjoyable when it proceeds just as I expect it to. - A-ya

Suzumu

#37. Luckily, the public school system that I was in had a really great drama program, so I plunged into that. It really sort of kept me afloat because I was bored in school.

Allison Scagliotti

#38. The public school system doesn't get everybody. Every generation has its rebels.

Rush Limbaugh

#39. I graduated from public high school. I went to the prom. I did it all. But I also worked on 30-million dollar movies with roller coasters and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's been a very interesting and blessed life for sure.

Ryan Merriman

#40. More is learned in a public than in a private school, from emulation. There is the collision of mind with mind, or the radiation of many minds pointing to one center.

Samuel Johnson

#41. A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.

Charles Babbage

#42. Maintaining order in the classrooms has never been easy and it is evident that the school setting requires some easing of the restrictions to which searches by public authorities are ordinarily subject.

Byron White

#43. In 2006, the number of children in targeted school choice programs nationwide will reach six digits for the first time, representing a 40 percent increase in the number of children in targeted school choice programs and an even bigger increase in the amount of public funding.

Clint Bolick

#44. It is true, there was no public-school system, and the reason for it was very plain. The wealth of the upper classes enabled them to have private tutors.

John Sergeant Wise

#45. I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.

Emma Stone

#46. I remember the mentoring experiences of some teachers that I had, like a second term home room teacher in public school that really was very helpful to me.

Sanford I. Weill

#47. There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The "negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.

Pat Buchanan

#48. The public scrutiny element they don't teach you in film school. So few people are ever subjected to it.

Colin Trevorrow

#49. 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

#50. The traditional religious right's failure to restore public-school prayer or pass an antiabortion constitutional amendment has likely helped fuel the spread of the more extreme dominionist school.

Jon Meacham

#51. In the U.S., the term 'general aviation' means its exact opposite, the way 'public school' does in England. An English public school is private and, on top of that, exclusive. Likewise, general-aviation airports in the U.S. are for everyone but the general public.

Tom Wolfe

#52. I tried to imagine myself part of a pack of guys who picked up local public school girls on weekends. It was hard to envision, but I was definitely willing to try. Not the pickup part. Just the being in a posse part.

Bill Konigsberg

#53. I had a bad experience doing public speaking at school. I had to talk about a pen for five minutes and it was really hard work. I couldn't wait to get off the stage.

Karl Pilkington

#54. In 1962, the Supreme Court banned organized prayer from public schools. Since then, federal, state, and local courts and officials, including public school administrators, have joined in a nationwide search and destroy mission for student religious practices.

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

#55. Lucky enough, through the public school system, I had been able to have some music education, and that gave me something to focus on, and discipline - like a family to feel part of. There was a healthy family.

Flea

#56. I was very much a product of the public-school system. There was only one other kid in my class who had parents not involved in the stock market or law.

Daniel Radcliffe

#57. Only one day at public school and the bitches already made your locker rain?" she laughs. "Impressive.

Colleen Hoover

#58. tried to impose 'intelligent design' creationism on the science curriculum of a local public school - a move of 'breathtaking inanity', to quote Judge Jones

Richard Dawkins

#59. By four years of age, the average child in a family receiving public assistance has heard about 13 million words, compared to 45 million for a child from a wealthier family. The disadvantages developed during their first four years are usually still present in high school.

Sal Albanese

#60. People think I have the benefit of a public school education. I have this suave and debonair label, but really, I'm as common as muck.

Charles Dance

#61. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

Vladimir Nabokov

#62. We developed at the local school district level probably the best public school system in the world. Or it was until the Federal government added Federal interference to Federal financial aid and eroded educational quality in the process.

Ronald Reagan

#63. Given the brief - and generally misleading - exposure most people have to mathematics at school, raising the public awareness of mathematics will always be an uphill battle.

Keith Devlin

#64. They haven't eliminated religion from the public school. They have eliminated Christianity and have replaced it with an anti-God religion - humanism.

Ken Ham

#65. When I look back now I realize I was such an obnoxious kid but, you know, I went to schools like you, like a public school in New York so compared to the anarchy that was going on there, they really wouldn't - I wasn't like a bad kid. I saw people come in and punch the teachers.

Colin Quinn

#66. My appearance on 'Public School' garnered a smattering of fan mail from girls, which was good, and letters from mothers saying I was the sort of boy they'd like their daughters to go out with - which was not quite as good.

James Lovegrove

#67. It wasn't the Supreme Court that expelled God from our public school classrooms. It was the textbook publishers.

James J. Kilpatrick

#68. Everything that we used to think got taught at home now seemingly has to be taught in the public school system, and something is going to get lost in the process.

Ann Richards

#69. The concept of religious freedom is largely ignored in the curriculum of our nation's public schools.

Charles Haynes

#70. I went to a public high school, and after graduation, college wasn't really much of an option for me. I didn't believe I had the money or the grades at the time, so I continued to work and save money to support my acting career.

Christie Laing

#71. The system that had grown up in most states is that wealthy districts with an affluent population can afford to spend a lot more on their public school systems than the poorer districts.

William Weld

#72. Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

Immanuel Kant

#73. The rule with my mom was that the only way that I could be an actress when I was young was that I continued to go to public school and get straight A's in all my classes.

Sara Paxton

#74. It hapens very often that parents think they are worred about the progress a boy is making. they do not realise that all boys are numskulls with o branes which is not surprising when you look at the parents really the whole thing goes on and on and there is no stoping it it is a vicious circle.

Geoffrey Willans

#75. My athleticism was really the core to social acceptance, because in those days the overwhelming number of students came from more of a public school background than I did.

Roger Bannister

#76. His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

Mary Antin

#77. Americans are incredibly religious as a nation, and we have gotten that way by having the government stay out of religion and say religion is a private matter. The government doesn't take sides. Public schools don't promote or denigrate any religion.

Rachel Maddow

#78. I was a country kid who went to a public school, and she was more of a middle-class girl who attended a private school. I was into hunting and fishing, and she liked drama and singing in the choir at school and church. Our lives up until that point were totally different.

Jase Robertson

#79. Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?

Charles Francis Potter

#80. I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs, the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that.

Jack Valenti

#81. Recent decades clearly demonstrate that the more secular our Public Schools become the less successful they become academically.

David Barton

#82. It is also important to remember that no state in the United States requires a homeschooling parent to have a public school teaching certificate, just as many private schools do not require one (though some, such as Montessori and Waldorf, require teacher training in their unique programs). The

Patrick Farenga

#83. Public schools are where the next generation of leaders are educated and where cultural exchange will take place.

Eugenie Scott

#84. A core part of Teach For America's mission has always been affecting positive change in the traditional public school system.

Wendy Kopp

#85. As a retired educator I have seen first-hand the impact a great education can have on a young person's life. I will always be a champion for public schools, our teachers, and our children.

Alma Adams

#86. Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation.

Mark Twain

#87. Frankly, I'm not sure how far I would get if I attended public school today. It's not just that public schools aren't producing the results we want - it's that we're not giving them what they need to help students achieve at high levels. K-12 education in the United States is deeply antiquated.

Eli Broad

#88. Everybody around the world wants to send their kids to our universities. But nobody wants to send their kids here to public school.

Walter Annenberg

#89. When you introduce competition into the public school system, most studies show that schools start to do better when they are competing for students.

Bill Cosby

#90. Across the Jewish community, the MLK Shabbat Suppers are part of Repair the World's multi-year effort to mobilize Jews across the nation to serve as tutors, mentors, and college access coaches for public school children.

Lynn Schusterman

#91. I remember as a kid having the offer of a scholarship, that it was going to be like going to Mars, and deciding to stay in my public school.

Edward Norton

#92. I like to engage the public because when I was in high school, I had all these questions about anti-matter, higher dimensions and time travel. Every time I went to the library, every time I asked people these questions, I would get some strange looks. Nobody could answer any of these questions.

Michio Kaku

#93. We don't have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem. And since we've ordered god out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn't act so surprised ... when all hell breaks loose,

Mike Huckabee

#94. A public school-educated stockbroker, who wants to shrink the state and let the markets rip, who reinvented himself as a man of the people and convinced millions of disillusioned working-class voters he was on a mission to smash the rich elite he belonged to.

Brian Reade

#95. The Ten Commandments being taken out of the public schools. I want them back.

Kinky Friedman

#96. 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

#97. Are public school textbooks biased? Are they censored? The answer to both is yes. And the nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks.

Paul Vitz

#98. If we truly believe in our public schools, then we have a moral responsibility to do better - to break the either-or mentality around school reform, and embrace a both-and mentality. Good schools will require both the structural reform and the resources necessary to prepare our kids for the future.

Barack Obama

#99. All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive.

Sinclair Lewis

#100. There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.

Mary Antin