Public School Quotes

I went to the public schools myself. And they were great for me. ~ Chuck Schumer

If you make the decision to send your kid to public school don't even look at private schools. Just shut the door. Just turn off the TV. And then you don't even have to worry about preschool. You have to worry about what's good for your kid, but you don't have to worry about how to position yourself. ~ Cynthia Nixon

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

At my public school I had hated every other face for fear the owner was a lord, at university, I was to court the rich while doubting whether there should be great inequalities between incomes. ~ Henry Green

Cincinnati like so many other cities, we know that so many of our schools, when it comes to public schools, are still de facto segregated racially. It has to do with residential segregation. It has to do with James Crow, Jr., which is at work, de facto rather than legally so that some of the integration is taking place among more and more well-to-do. ~ Cornel West

Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world. ~ E. M. Forster

I'm convinced many of America's heroes are public school teachers and administrators. Many of these people do what they do because of their faith. ~ Adam Hamilton

I'd got accepted to the seminary in Wisconsin, and I was gonna become a priest, but the last second I thought, 'I'll just go to public school.' I had just gotten a new amplifier in my bedroom, and I didn't think I was allowed to take it with me. ~ Jack White

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

Close Dept. of Education, but don't dismantle public schools. ~ Ron Paul

Many years ago Christian pioneers had to fight savage Indians. Today missionaries of these former cultures are being sent via the public schools to heathenize our children. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

My colleague Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, erroneously suggested that I support the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution. That simply is not true. ... Unlike biological evolution, intelligent design is not a genuine scientific theory and, therefore, has no place in the curriculum of our nation's public school science classes. ~ Edward Kennedy

I exclusively attended public school ... And I can honestly say that on the day of my graduation, if you had given me a pop quiz on history, science, or math, I would have in no way been able to pass it - despite the fact that I completely understood it at the time that it had been 'taught' to me, and had even made a good 'grade' on it. ~ Jessica Bowman

I didn't want to get stuck in pretty, public school roles, or I knew I'd end up as some sort of caricature. ~ Robert Pattinson

And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out. ~ Philip K. Dick

I'm a very big public school advocate. ~ Cynthia Nixon

I just started as a part of the public school music program. I took lessons at the school every Friday and was a part of the school band. I was just a normal kid taking instrumental lessons at school, nothing special. ~ Kenny G

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

In May 2012 - a year after the Arab awakening erupted - the United States made two financial commitments to the Arab world that each began with the numbers 1 and 3. The U.S. gave Egypt's military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid? ~ Thomas L. Friedman

And what these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in - think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them. ~ Anand Giridharadas

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

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

It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere - mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self ... Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are [they are much the same in most countries], how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and esthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students. ~ John Holt

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

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents. ~ Anne Waldman

But, once again, when I said I'm so grateful for my mom just being adamant about me staying in public school - that is what allowed me to be exposed to so many different types of people. I went to a high school that was by the beach. I elected to do bussing my junior high school years. And my first year of high school, I would take the bus from my neighborhood to the beach schools. And at those schools, you had such a mix of so many types of kids. ~ Regina King

Did I ever tell you I went to school in America?"
"What? No."
"It's true,for a year. Eighth grade. It was terrible."
"Eighth grade is terrible for everyone," I say.
"Well,it was worse for me. My parents had just seperated,and my mum moved back to California.I hadn't been since I was an infant,but I went with her,and I was put in this horrid public school-"
"Oh,no. Public school."
He nudges me with his shoulder. "The other kids were ruthless. They made fun of everything about me-my height,my accent, the way I dressed.I vowed I'd never go back."
"But American girls love English accents." I blurt this without thinking, and then pray he doesn't notice my blush.
St. Clair picks up a pebble and tosses it into the river. "Not in middle school, they don't.Especially when it's attached to a bloke who comes up to their kneecaps."
I laugh.
"So when the year was over,my parents found a new school for me. I wanted to go back to London,where my mates were, but my father insisted on Paris so he could keep an eye on me. And that's how I would up at the School of America. ~ Stephanie Perkins

Praise God for those of you who do homeschool. I can't emphasize enough: Do what you can to get your kids out of public school. If you can't afford to put them in a private Christian school, homeschool. Because they're being poisoned in the public schools. They're being brainwashed in the public schools, with all this secularism, with all this immorality that is being immersed into them on a daily basis. ~ Rafael Cruz

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

Growing up, I was always in normal public school which is very important in my eyes. ~ Tahj Mowry

Let's pass more gun control laws and buy metal detectors for every public school in the land - anything but tell kids that life is sacred, because its Creator deems it so. ~ Don Feder

There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system. ~ Steven Chu

The modern public school derived from a philosophy of freedom reflected in the First Amendment ... The non-sectarian or secular public school was the means of reconciling freedom in general with religious freedom. ~ William J. Brennan

His public school scholarship had ~ Anonymous

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal education opportunities? We believe that it does. ~ Earl Warren

In my mind, there is no reason public school reform should be a partisan issue. ~ Michael Bennet

Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools. ~ Walter E. Williams

Going to public school is like living in bubble, you have no concept of what other people do. ~ Thighpaulsandra

Perhaps what matters," Sunstein muses, "is not whether people are right on the facts, but whether they are frightened." And people do seem to be frightened. We are locking our doors and pulling our children out of public school and buying guns and ritually sanitizing our hands to allay a wide range of fears, most of which are essentially fears of other people. All the while we are also, in our way, reckless. We get intoxicated, from the Latin "to poison," for fun. This contradiction leads Sunstein to worry that regulatory laws based on the priorities of the general public maybe prone to a pattern of "paranoia and neglect." Too much attention may be spent on minimal risks, while too little is paid to pressing threats. Paranoia, the theorist Eve Sedgwick observes, tends to be contagious. She calls it a "strong theory," meaning a wide-ranging, reductive theory that displaces other ways of thinking. And paranoia very frequently passes for intelligence. As Sedgwick observes, "to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant." She does not believe that paranoid thinking is necessarily delusional or wrong, but only that there is value to approaches that are less rooted in suspicion. "Paranoia," Sedgwick writes, "knows some things well and others poorly. ~ Eula Biss

It is not that the Englishman can't feel-it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks-his pipe might fall out if he did. ~ E. M. Forster

When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French. ~ J M G Le Clezio

[T]ry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda. ~ L. Neil Smith

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

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

Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools? ~ B.F. Skinner

I miss my friends in public school, but it's kind of a part of something that you have to give up. I'd rather perform than go to public school. ~ Jackie Evancho

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children ... ~ Shirley Jackson

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

She went to the public school that the three youngest girls attended and in halting English told the teacher that the children must be encouraged to speak only English; they were not to use a German word or phrase ever. In that way, she protected them against their father. She grieved when her children had to leave school after the sixth grade and go out working. She grieved when they married no-account men. She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship. Each ~ Betty Smith

I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. ~ Alice Oswald

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

If Darwinists are opposed to mentioning scientific problems with their view, you would think they would be even more opposed to mentioning intelligent design. Yet Darwinists have been discussing ID in public school science classes for years ... Biology textbooks have been mentioning intelligent design since the late 1990s - but only to misrepresent and disparage it. ~ Jonathan Wells

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

I had several teachers who inspired me, in both the public school system and the Upward Bound program. I needed several, because I lived in such abject poverty and dysfunction. And they're still in my life today, because I consider them to be friends, actually. ~ Viola Davis

The question that has perhaps divided students of vouchers more than any other is their likely effect on the social and economic class structure. Some have argued that the great value of the public school has been as a melting pot, in which rich and poor, native- and foreign-born, black and white have learned to live together. That image was and is largely true for small communities, but almost entirely false for large cities. There, the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location. It is no accident that most of the country's outstanding public schools are in high-income enclaves. ~ Milton Friedman

If you could find a major city that actually had a functioning, good public school system, you should buy all the real estate. ~ Sam Zell

If you are a czar or a king or a president or someone that wants to control those below them you do not want people to have a consciousness of life, of their needs. Because people do not make good slaves when they're connected to life ... That's why in the public schools the primary objective is obedience to authority. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

I was home-schooled. My mom wasn't a fan of public school systems. ~ Britt Robertson

There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff. ~ John Le Carre

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~ Clarence Darrow

But in public school i learned that it was not only natural but desirable that i should make my own decisions. it was not a matter of cultural background or personality or abilities; it was simply what was true and right ~ Sheena Iyengar

I went to a public school in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and it's a very rural community. I was an artist kid, and I just didn't fit in very well. ~ Crystal Bowersox

A boy will learn more true wisdom in a public school in a year than by a private education in five. It is not from masters, but from their equals, that youth learn a knowledge of the world. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

No greater nor more affectionate honor can be conferred on an American than to have a public school named after him. ~ Herbert Hoover

The upscale neighborhoods in Blue Sky Hill weren't all lily white anymore, but you could be sure their kids didn't wear our kind of clothes, or get free lunches at the Summer Kitchen, or pick up used books and magazines down at the Book Basket store, or go to the public school. These days it wasn't about what color you were, but how much money you had. The same, only different. It was still people not wanting to be with people who weren't their kind. ~ Lisa Wingate

We so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would.
And what the hell?
Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Religion is a personal, private matter and parents, not public school officials, should decide their children's religious training. We should not have teacher-led prayers in public schools, and school officials should never favor one religion over another, or favor religion over no religion (or vice versa). I also believe that schools should not restrict students' religious liberties. The free exercise of faith is the fundamental right of every American, and that right doesn't stop at the schoolhouse door. ~ George W. Bush

That is, contrary to the dominant thinking on this issue, the data show that the more regulated public school sector embraces more innovative and effective professional practices, while independent schools often use their greater autonomy to avoid such reforms, leading to curricular stagnation. ~ Christopher A. Lubienski

So I want my kids to go to public schools because I think it's a better education overall. ~ Chuck Schumer

Harvard produces leaders. People with Harvard degrees go on to become administrators in high-level positions in state educational departments and in public schools around the country. ~ Christina Hoff Sommers

My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids. ~ Bryan Stevenson

I would come back to public school for usually about half the year. It was actually better for me to be out of school a lot, because I was two years younger than everybody, which is a bad situation, socially. ~ Harry Shearer

The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal. ~ John Dewey

There is no neutral (or secular) area of life. When we set up an area or institution not acknowledging God's sovereignty we become an enemy of God and are in rebellion. The public school system in America is a good example. It is not neutral religiously. It has simply exchanged the Christian religion for that of humanism. ~ Marshall Foster

I know an American family that spent several years living in England. They had one son, who was an average student: not great, but not terrible. When the family returned home to the United States, the parents enrolled him in the local public school. Mom was startled by the continual drumbeat from teachers and other parents: "Maybe your son has ADHD. Have you considered trying a medication?" She told me, "It was weird, like everybody was in on this conspiracy to medicate my son. In England, none of the kids is on medication. Or if they are, it's a secret. But I really don't think many are. Here it seems like almost all the kids are on medication. Especially the boys. ~ Leonard Sax

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

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

I can't imagine going to an all-girls school. I went to a public school. ~ Amy Sedaris

I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-'70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment. ~ Feisal Abdul Rauf

In America our public schools are intended to be religiously neutral. Our teachers and schools are neither to endorse nor to inhibit religion. I believe this is a very good thing. ~ Adam Hamilton

I went to public school my whole life. It was a performing arts school, so I can't say if it was a typical experience or not, because it's all I know. ~ Eden Sher

The tutor gave us our work, and if we had trouble, she'd help us on it, but we were really only working on the stuff that our school gave us - well, I was, because I go to a public school. ~ Quinn Shephard

Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school - and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Public school teachers are the new priesthood while traditional religion is ridiculed and maligned. ~ Ann Coulter

If religious freedom is to endure in America, the responsibility for teaching religion to public school children must be left to the homes and churches of our land, where this responsibility rightfully belongs. It must not be assumed by the government through the agency of the public school system. ~ Sam Ervin

I'd seen how the top-performing girls at Laurinda were cultivated like hothouse strawberries - bright and lush. Out in the real world, they would bruise. I wanted to see how the Cabinet would cope in two years' time, when they would be in the same classes as my most driven and hard-working Christ Our Saviour friends, and the most tenacious and gifted public school students, the hardy banksias and olive trees and root vegetables that would last all through winter. ~ Alice Pung

Those who can afford private schooling need not worry about their children being deprived of art, music and literature in the classroom: they are more sheltered, for now, from the doctrine of efficiency that has been radically refashioning the public school curriculum. ~ Azar Nafisi

At first, I felt bad judging an entire state by one county political official, but then I found out Morrison had also helped screen public school textbooks, a topic which is another chapter in my book. The Alamo is managed by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, a group whose members can claim a relative who was living in Texas during the revolution. The fight over mismanagement of the Alamo has been going on for years. ~ Gail Collins

I am old enough to remember when America's K-12 public schools were the best in the world. I am a proud graduate of them, and I credit much of my success to what I learned in Detroit Public Schools and at Michigan State University. ~ Eli Broad

If you ask the other John and Peggy (my parents) how they've managed to stay married for well over half a century, they'll credit an uncompromising level of honesty with each other. If you press them, though, you'll learn that their commitment to the truth did not extend to their children. Indeed, when it came to raising three boys on a public school teachers salary, my parents lied like rugs./
It was a strange sort of snobbery to develop at such an early age - this sympathy for the more fortunate - but that's precisely what my parents engendered. With duplicity and guile, they Turn envy to pity. By the time I was eleven, I felt nothing but compassion for classmates of mine who had been forced to wear the latest fashions. Sadly, they had no older cousins to provide them with a superior wardrobe of "softer, sturdier, broken-in alternatives. ~ Mike Rowe

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.

When I was sent to public school, I was relieved that I could wear what I wanted to wear. ~ Davey Havok

Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him. ~ Jonathan Kozol

I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated. ~ Spike Lee

If you have free universal health care and free education supported by public school taxes, then you have more bargaining power with your bosses, but if everything is privatized, and ordinary Americans have to pay for everything through their wages, then they're at the mercy of their employers. If the workers know they'll be ruined if they lost their jobs, they're not going to be uppity. You want to break their spirit. ~ Michael Lind

The difference between the denominational system and the public school system is all the difference between bolstering them up on the one hand and letting them alone of the other. ~ Edmund Barton

A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves. ~ J.B. Priestley

I clearly had a few daddy issues myself, but you didn't see me pulling the wings off of flies. On the other hand, I did have a slight anger-management problem, and a related history of physical violence, both well documented by the public school system. And, oh yeah, that whole "hallucinating alien spacecraft from my favorite videogame" thing. So perhaps I wasn't in the best position to judge the sanity of others. ~ Ernest Cline

I attended public school with the same group of kids from K through 12. ~ Thomas Friedman

I've noticed that my resolutions involve me not doing stuff that I wasn't going to do anyway so here's something more positive. I'm going to retrain as a Latin teacher in a provincial public school. ~ Arthur Smith