Let me begin by saying that if you do not know who Thomas Sowell is, you need to be educated on this matter! The 94-year-old Black American economist, educator and social commentator is one of the best minds around. The author of nearly four dozen books, he has written on all sorts of subjects, but education is quite often in his sights. He has penned a number of books on this topic, including these important titles:
Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972); Education: Assumptions Versus History (1986); Inside American Education (1993); Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020).
Being an American, much of his discussion on education focuses on the scene in America, but he is well-versed in what is happening around the globe, and much of what he says is quite appropriate to other nations, including Australia. Here then are 30 key quotes, many taken from the books mentioned above, but others from his columns and the like. I offer them in a rather random fashion, and sadly without references.
“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
“Parents who send their children to school with instructions to respect and obey their teachers may be surprised to discover how often these children are sent back home conditioned to disrespect and disobey their parents. While psychological-conditioning programs may not succeed in producing the atomistic society, or the self-sufficient and morally isolated individual which seems to be their ideal, they may nevertheless confuse children who receive very different moral and social messages from school and home. In short, too many American schools are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated, and socially maladjusted.”
“The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.”
“The idea that taxpayers owe it to you to pay for what you want suggests that much of today’s education fails to instill reality, and instead panders to a self-centered sense of entitlement to what other people have earned.”
“Our schools and colleges are laying a guilt trip on those young people whose parents are productive, and who are raising them to become productive. What is amazing is how easily this has been done, largely just by replacing the word ‘achievement’ with the word ‘privilege’.”
“When all else fails, spokesmen and apologists for the education establishment blame a lack of money—often expressed as a lack of ‘commitment’ by the public or the government—for their problems. The issue is posed as how ‘serious’ the public, or its political leaders, are about ‘investing’ in the education of the next generation. This cleverly turns the tables on critics and loads guilt onto the tax-paying public for the failures of American schools and colleges. Implicit in all this is the wholly unsupported assumption that more money means better education. Neither comparisons among states, comparisons over time, nor international comparisons, lend any credence to this arbitrary (and self-serving) assumption.”
“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans– anything except reason.”
“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried,’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.”
“It tells us a lot about academia that the president of Smith College quickly apologized for saying, ‘All lives matter,’ after being criticized by those who are pushing the slogan, ‘Black lives matter.’ If science could cross breed a jellyfish with a parrot, it could create academic administrators.”
“Apparently almost anyone can do a better job of educating children than our so-called ‘educators’ in the public schools. Children who are home-schooled by their parents also score higher on tests than children educated in the public schools…. Successful education shows what is possible, whether in charter schools, private schools, military schools or home-schooling. The challenge is to provide more escape hatches from failing public schools, not only to help those students who escape, but also to force these institutions to get their act together before losing more students and jobs.”
“Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence.”
“Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that self-esteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.”
“That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable—except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children.”
“Someone once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of our own ignorance. Our schools are depriving millions of students of that kind of knowledge by promoting ‘self-esteem’ and encouraging them to have opinions on things of which they are grossly ignorant, if not misinformed.”
“Today’s educators believe it is their job to introduce children to sex when and in whatever manner they see fit, regardless of what the children’s parents might think. Raw movies of both heterosexuals and homosexuals in action are shown in elementary schools. Weaning children away from their parents’ influence in general is a high priority in many schools.”
“The responses of the educational establishment to the academic deficiencies of their students today include (1) secrecy, (2) camouflage, (3) denial, (4) shifting the blame elsewhere, and (5) demanding more money.”
“Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.”
“If there is one common denominator among public school teachers and administrators, it is that the very idea of testing their beliefs against evidence never seems to occur to them. The educational dogmas of the day simply reign supreme until new dogmas come along.”
“The phrase ‘I feel’ is often used by American students to introduce a conclusion, rather than say ‘I think,’ or ‘I know,’ much less ‘I conclude.’ Unfortunately, ‘I feel’ is often the most accurate term—and is regarded as sufficient by many teachers, as well as students. The net result, as in mathematics, is that many students are confident incompetents, whether discussing social issues, world events, or other subjects. The emphasis is on having students express opinions on issues, and on having those opinions taken seriously (enhancing self-esteem), regardless of whether there is anything behind them.”
“Too much of what is called ‘education’ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”
“Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels. Some zealots have not hesitated to use the traditional brain-washing technique of emotional trauma in the classroom to soften up children for their message. Gruesome and graphic movies on nuclear war, for example, have reduced some school children to tears—after which the teacher makes a pitch for whatever movement claims to reduce such dangers. Another technique is the ambush shock: A seventh-grade teacher in Manhattan, for example, innocently asked her students to discuss their future plans—after which she said: ‘Haven’t any of you realized that in this world with nuclear weapons no one in this class will be alive in the year 2000?’”
“Although educators have been quick to blame the failures of the schools on factors outside the schools, there has been remarkably little critical examination of these claims. It is unquestionably true that the home backgrounds of children influence how well they do in school, and that these backgrounds vary by social class and by race. However, to say that an influence exists is not to say that it explains the particular pattern that we see.”
“Academics are a special-interest group. Their special interest is to get their production costs paid for by other people [notably the taxpayers] and to give their product a good image so that it will sell. Whether their product actually helps the consumer afterwards is secondary, at best.”
“Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our political parties can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.”
“Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational ‘excellence,’ I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.”
“Virtually no idea is too ridiculous to be accepted, even by very intelligent and highly educated people, if it provides a way for them to feel special and important. Some confuse that feeling with idealism.”
“American education is undermined by numerous dogmas and numerous hidden agendas. The dogmas fall into two general categories—dogmas about education and dogmas about the larger society. ‘Self-esteem,’ ‘role models,’ ‘diversity,’ and other buzzwords dominate educational policy—without evidence being either asked or given to substantiate the beliefs they represent. Sweeping beliefs about the general society, or about how life ought to be lived, likewise become prevalent among educators without empirical verification being required. More important, world-saving crusades based on such beliefs have increasingly intruded into the classroom, from kindergarten to college, crowding out the basic skills that American students lack. Some of this represents changing views among educators as to the role of education. Behind much of the world-saving curriculum, however, are the organized efforts of outside interests and movements, determined to get their special messages into the classroom.”
“So long as public schools are treated as places that exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers’ unions, do not be surprised to see American students continuing to score lower on international tests than students in countries that spend a lot less per pupil than we do.”
“If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don’t congratulate yourself on your compassion.”
“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”
