Is it really about the kids? Does our school district believe in education, or construction? When Harry Amend asked administrators what they wanted, did they list anything that had to do with kids or education? or did they create a wish list of things to buy, needed or not?

Enjoy some of the quotes from our culture’s greatest minds on the topic of education:

The public school system is already so beleaguered by bureaucracy; so cowed by the demands of due process; so overwhelmed with faddish curricula that its educational purpose is almost an afterthought.
-CA Justice Janice Rogers Brown

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
– Agatha Christie

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
– Margaret Mead

The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
– George Bernard Shaw

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
– Mark Twain

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
– Albert Einstein

Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children.
– Walt Disney

Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.
– Leonardo Da Vinci

Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?
– Isabel Paterson

It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.
– Albert Shanker – During his time as head of the American Federation of Teachers

When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.
– Albert Shanker

The NEA is a terrorist organization.
– Secretary of Education Rod Paige

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
– Milton Friedman

Despite a documented low correlation between money spent and improvement in the quantity and quality of public education, the reform of public education has focused almost exclusively on the financial issue.
– Paul Zane Pilzer

As for money, the relationship between it and effective schools has been studied to death. The unanimous conclusion is that there is no connection between school funding and school performance.
– Brookings Institution scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe, 1990

Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.
– William Lowe Bryan

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.
– Thomas Jefferson

The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as `free education’ is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education – just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office – and cannot possibly be separated from political control.
– Frank Chodorov, “Why Free Schools Are Not Free,” 1948

If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.
– James Madison

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in nursery.
– Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister

At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.
– Benito Mussolini

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
– Mark Twain