Here are some other strong voices calling for a humane educational future for us all.

	"How many other places look and feel exactly as they did 20, 30, or 40 years ago? Banks don't. Hospitals don't. Grocery stores don't. Maybe the sweet nostalgia I sniffed on those classroom visits was really the odor of stagnation. Since most other institutions in American society have changed dramatically in the past half-century, the stasis of schools is strange. … But this model doesn't work in a world of accelerated cycle times, shrinking company half-lives, and the rapid obsolescence of knowledge and skills. In a free agent economy, our education system must allow people to learn throughout their lives." - Daniel H. Pink, from, "School's Out: Get ready for the new age of individualized education" in Reason Magazine. American writer, former speech writer for Al Gore
	"…I would totally change the structure and get rid of the four walls concept both physically and psychologically. …In addition, students would be placed as helpers or apprentices in every possible activity of the adult world. They might learn some skills and they would certainly get a feel for the real world of work in its various forms. … Our society has compartmentalized people for convenience. This is not healthy, and even dangerous…. It gets worse each year in spite of all the ideas and experiments of the educational research priesthood. … Just like industrial chickens and cattle we have tried for economy of scale and have found it very expensive not only for plant and equipment but in psychological terms. The human spirit is at risk … " - Famed Canadian wildlife painter and naturalist, Robert Bateman
	"We put undergraduates through a set of requirements and paces for no redeeming intellectual reason-certainly not high standards—without a constructive result." - Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, an outspoken advocate of ending high school by age 16
	"A bad home for a child is better than a good institution." - The late British psychiatrist John Bowlby famed for his groundbreaking work on Attachment Theory
	"Adolescence as we know it in the United States should be abolished, and we should also stop exporting this dysfunctional period of life to other countries. Teens in the United States are almost completely isolated from adults, and adults in turn have very little understanding of what it is like to be a teen. The time has come to end the isolation. Young and old, we will all benefit by restoring the childhood continuum that existed throughout most of history in industrialized nations and that still exists in preindustrial societies today. The teen years need to be what they used to be: a time not just of learning, but of learning to be responsible adults." - Robert Epstein in The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen
	"The major conclusion from this survey is that our organized systems of schooling and continuing education and training are like big ships floating in a sea of informal learning. If these education and training ships do not pay increasing attention to the massive amount of outside informal learning, many of them are likely to sink into Titanic irrelevancy." - David Livingstone, Director of The Research Network on New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto from the "General Summary of Findings from the First Canadian Survey of Informal Learning"
	"For the past sixty years, we have lived with factory education. The teaching of children by parents, elders and older peers has all but disappeared. … History will show that the invention of the television, the microchip and the internet have caused a social revolution equal if not greater than that caused by the printing press. We are now living in a post-literate, high-speed, image-based global culture that is radically democratic. Factory schooling is obsolete for three main reasons: it remains devoted to print literacy, it is rigidly hierarchical and insists on the application of one basic process to all students." - Esteemed Toronto Educator and High School English Teacher Michael Reist, from his book, The Dysfunctional School
	"If we do not challenge the assumption that valuable knowledge is a commodity which under certain circumstances may be forced into the consumer, society will be increasingly dominated by sinister pseudo schools and totalitarian managers of information." - Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society
	"Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves." - John Taylor Gatto, winner of New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year Award, excerpted from his September 2003 Harper's Magazine cover story, "Against School - How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why"

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©copyright Kate Tennier, 2009