P14-15
School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life – in fact it destroys communities by regulating the training of children to the hands of certified experts – and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are near a school or an old people’s reservation if you wish a demonstration.
School was built as an essential support system for a model of social engineering.

P21
‘… the lessons in school prevent children keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love – and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
…
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.’

P24
‘We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent; nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact the name ”community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. School is a major factor in this tragedy…’

P26
‘I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re gong to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution ”schools” very well, though it does not ”educate”; that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.’

P27
It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit n confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the way television does.’

P31
‘The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness; they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
…
The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. They cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be, the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy; so intimate relationships have to be avoided.’

P37
A restructured school system needs: ‘Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer – these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling’
But the reform is not going to work ‘until we force open the idea of ”school” to include family as the main engine of education.
…
The ”Curriculum of the Family” is at the heart of any good life.’

P67
What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit – and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time.