"Science is magic that works."
--Kurt Vonnegut
American novelist; author of 14 novels (1922-)
"No inquisitive mind will be content to be ignorant."
--Thomas Jefferson
American politician and president; author of the Declaration of Independence (1743-1826)
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."
--Samuel Johnson
English writer (1678-1851)
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
--Albert Einstein
German Jewish physicist; Nobel Prize laureate in physics - 1921 (1879-1955)
"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience."
--Anne Sullivan
American educator (1866-1936); taught and worked with Helen Keller from 1887-1925
"Real reform will jettison the deadly belief that ordinary children are too stupid to be partners in their own educations ... kids need to understand that nobody on earth can give you an education except yourself."
--John Taylor Gatto
American writer and education reform activist, three-time New York State Teacher of the Year; author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992) and other books