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["Lynda" <lurine AT softcom.net>]

For those who are bound and determined that we need public schools to 
produce doctors, lawyers and scientists, let me give you a list of a just a 
few folks who would say otherwise:

Francis S. Collins:  head of the public portion of the Human Genome Project. 
Homeschooled, no formal curriculum.

Ivan Illich:  "we have come to realise that for most men the right to learn 
is curtailed by the obligation to attend school"

Meighan:  "A recent MORI poll, commissioned by the Campaign for Learning, 
found that 90% of adults were favourably inclined towards further learning 
for themselves.....The bad news is that 75% said they were unhappy and 
alienated in the school environment and that, therefore, they preferred to 
learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other 
than a school-type setting."

Isabel Patterson:  "A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the 
complete model of the totalitarian state."

John Taylor Gatto:  "By bells and many other similar techniques they 
(schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is 
progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is 
worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the 
point."

Gene Royer:  "Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two 
sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be 
certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school environment, the 
teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn."

Alexandre Dumas:  "How is it that little children are so intelligent and men 
so stupid?  It must be education that does it."

Ann Sullivan:  "I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems 
of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every 
child is a kind of idiot who must taught to think. Whereas if the child is 
left to himself, he will think more and better, if less slowly. Let him come 
and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for 
himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table while a 
sweet-voiced teacher suggest that he build a stone wall with his wooden 
blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of colored paper, or plant straw 
trees in flower pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial 
associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop 
independent ideas out of actual experiences."

Plato:  "Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the 
mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a 
sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent 
of the child."

There are lots more.

Lynda