Quotations on / about school

Children in home-school conflict situations often receive a double message from their parents: "The school is the hope for your future, listen, be good and learn" and "the school is your enemy. . . ." Children who receive the "school is the enemy" message often go after the enemy—act up, undermine the teacher, undermine the school program, or otherwise exercise their veto power.

(James P. Comer (20th century), U.S. psychiatrist and author. School Power, ch. 2 (1980).)
More quotations from: James P Comer

I'm tired of playing worn-out depressing ladies in frayed bathrobes. I'm going to get a new hairdo and look terrific and go back to school and even if nobody notices, I'm going to be the most self-fulfilled lady on the block.

(Joanne Woodward (b. 1930), U.S. actor. As quoted in Ms. magazine, p. 54 (February 1975). Woodward, an Academy Award-winning movie actor, was commenting on the uninteresting sameness of the roles available to her. She did indeed return to school; a number of years later, she and one of her daughters received their baccalaureates from Sarah Lawrence College on the same day.)
More quotations from: Joanne Woodward

After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.

(Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842-1911), U.S. chemist and educator. As quoted in The Life of Ellen H. Richards, ch. 9, by Caroline L. Hunt (1912). Written in the 1860s. Richards was reacting to the social constraints and heavy housekeeping duties imposed on schoolgirls.)
More quotations from: Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards

The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.

(Virginia Thrall Smith (1836-1903), U.S. educator and social reformer. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 13, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981). From a speech, "The Kindergarten," given at the Congress of Women at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Smith established the first free kindergarten in Connecticut and pressed successfully for passage of a state law requiring public kindergartens.)
More quotations from: Virginia Thrall Smith

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

(John Keats (1795-1821), British poet. letter, Feb. 14-May 3, 1819, to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats. Letters of John Keats, no. 123, ed. Frederick Page (1954).)
More quotations from: John Keats

Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.

(William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Romeo, in Romeo and Juliet, act 2, sc. 2, l. 156-7. On leaving Juliet.)
More quotations from: William Shakespeare

The happiest two-job marriages I saw during my research were ones in which men and women shared the housework and parenting. What couples called good communication often meant that they were good at saying thanks to one another for small aspects of taking care of the family. Making it to the school play, helping a child read, cooking dinner in good spirit, remembering the grocery list,... these were silver and gold of the marital exchange.

(Arlie Hochschild (20th century). The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, ch. 16 (1989).)
More quotations from: Arlie Hochschild