12 Kurt Vonnegut Quotes on Education

Kurt Vonnegut quotes on education

2. High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

3. I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade.

4. Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.

85. Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

86. Roses are red And ready for plucking You're sixteen And ready for high school.

104. I've often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they're on, why they don't fall off it, how much time they've probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don't fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn't explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I'd tell them how we reproduce, how long we've been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn't learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn't a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It's also a source of hope. It means we don't have to continue this way if we don't like it.

153. I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college. 'Yale,' he said. I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called 'Plantation Owners' Tech.' 'I don't get it,' he said. 'I had to ask her to explain it myself,' I said. 'She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them.'

192. Napalm came from Harvard. Veritas!

195. George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography.

196. Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?

204. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

210. If you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington DC.