Section 11: Education

The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" — which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first. — Wendell Berry

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Indian schools were like jails and run along military lines, with roll call four times a day...The schools are better now than they were in my time. They look good on the outside. More modern and expensive. The teachers understand the kids a little better, use more psychology and less stick. But in these fine new buildings Indian children still commit suicide, because they are lonely among all that noise and activity. I know of a ten-year-old girl who hanged herself...When we enter the school we at least know that we are Indians. We come out half red and half white, not knowing what we are. — Lame Deer, Lakota Medicine Man