“Under this outlook, the classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others.”
― Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
― Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
“In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it,” says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. “All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn’t agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.”
― Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
― Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
“You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.”
― The Complete Works of C. S. Lewis: From Narnia to the Space Trilogy and Mere Christianity: Christian allegory, apologetics, criticism, and spiritual memoirs
― The Complete Works of C. S. Lewis: From Narnia to the Space Trilogy and Mere Christianity: Christian allegory, apologetics, criticism, and spiritual memoirs
“Following the Prussian prescription of our first national school czar, William Torrey Harris — to alienate individual children from themselves in order to have their identities merge into a group identity — contemporary school planners treat children as categories: black, white, Hispanic, other; gifted and talented, special progress, mainstream, special education; rich, middle-class, poor, and with multiple subdivisions of each imaginable category, rather than as specific individuals with specific intellectual, social, psychological and physical needs.”
― Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
― Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
“Whether it will ever again be possible to take an education easily, in Massachusetts or any other state, will depend upon political decisions made by those — like yourselves — who hold power in trust for the rest of us. I mean no disrespect, only to signal my personal sadness when I say I don’t think those decisions will be made. My reasons for pessimism stem from knowing that failure is built into our political system because it forces our political leadership to depend for its election on the same financial interests which profit from schools staying the way they already are. Schools are a most lucrative source of contracts and an enormous jobs project with sinecures for friends and relatives of your campaign donors. Don’t chalk that up to cynicism: unless you acknowledge why your hands are tied in regard to school change, you’re certain to make the same mistakes year after year in counterfeit reforms. Change isn’t likely to be possible from any political center for the same reason, but it can come from defiant personal decisions made by simple men and women who won’t stand still for their kids being outraged any more — like the revolution of homeschoolers taking place nationwide. This system has had a century to prove itself, that’s enough. It didn’t work at the start except in house-generated fairy tales; it doesn’t work today, and it won’t work better in the future.”
― Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
― Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling
Stacey’s 2025 Year in Books
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