Mamacita says:  It is a sad and sorry thing that most public school children have been back in the classroom for a week or two, or more, by now.  Even though many schools are still not air-conditioned, kids have been sitting in crowded rooms, sweating together and looking longingly out of the windows – if they’re lucky enough to have a school with windows – and wishing for a breath of fresh air, in more ways than one.

The decision to start school so early was not an intelligent one; I would go so far as to say that the decision to put our children in school in August was the decision of a moron, an idiot, someone with no children, someone who probably weighs 500 pounds and lives in his mother’s basement, a person completely devoid of brains and common sense, a loser, a social dimwit a big poo-poo-head dummy.

Why do we allow this to happen?  A simple thing like starting school after Labor Day would make such a monumental difference for people’s vacation plans, the State Fair, and, in many locales, several degrees of heat and humidity.  People who run motels and tourist traps and zoos and theme parks would make more money.  It would tack on a week or two at the end of the year instead of the beginning, but what difference would THAT make?  Back in the day (you kids get off my lawn!) school always started after Labor Day.  When did this change?  Why did it change?  Why do we permit it to continue?

Besides, “those people” who remove their kids from school and take them to Cancun would do that any damn time they felt like it, anyway.

But, since the stores all still have their “Back to School” signs up – you know, right next to the Christmas displays – today’s Quotation Saturday is all about Back to School.  Enjoy.

1. Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you. –Erma Bombeck

2. Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day. It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken. –Bill Dodds  (Sigh.)

3. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. –Sydney J. Harris

4. You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

5. The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life. –Ernest Renan

6. The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. –Robert Maynard Hutchins

7. I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework. –Lily Tomlin as “Edith Ann”

8. The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book. –Author Unknown (In this day and age of worshipping the almighty standardized test score, the best teachers are usually in the rubber room.)

9. What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. –George Bernard Shaw

10. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. –Mark Twain

11. You can get all A’s and still flunk life. –Walker Percy

12. Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. –Albert Einstein

13. Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. –Edward Everett

14. Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. –William Haley

15. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. –Oscar Wilde

16. Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. –John W. Gardner

17. I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated. –Al McGuire

18. Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know. –Daniel J. Boorstin

19. The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions. –Bishop Mandell Creighton

20. You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. –Clay P. Bedford

21. You learn something every day if you pay attention. –Ray LeBlond

22. All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. –Martin H. Fischer

23. The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live. –Mortimer Adler

24. Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily. –Thomas Szasz

25. If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. –Donald D. Quinn

26. Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. –Will Durant

27. Learning is not compulsory … neither is survival. – Henry Ward Beecher

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

29. All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. — Aristotle

30. Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them. — Jerome Bruner

31. Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. — John Dewey

32. Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly. –Thomas Henry Huxley

33. It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled. –James Russell Lowell

34. The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. — Jean Piaget

35. It is only the ignorant who despise education. — Publius Syrus

36. Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals. — G.M. Trevelyan

37. I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. — Abraham Lincoln

38. 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

39. Dad, if you really want to know what happened in school, then you’ve got to know exactly who’s in the class, who rides the bus, what project they’re working on in science, and how your child felt that morning…. Without these facts at your fingertips, all you can really think to say is “So how was school today?” And you’ve got to be prepared for the inevitable answer—”Fine.” Which will probably leave you wishing that you’d never asked. –Ron Taffel

40. In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college. — Joseph Sobran

41. A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. — George Santayana

42. Going back to school is like going back in time. Immediately, for better or for worse, you must give up a little piece of your autonomy in order to become part of the group. And every group, of course, has its hierarchies and rules- spoken and unspoken. It is like learning to live once again in a family- which, of course, is the setting where all learning begins. — Alice Steinbach

43. We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 — and half the things he knows at 40 hadn’t been discovered when he was 20? –Arthur C. Clarke

44. There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves. –Soren Kierkegaard

45. The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion – these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness. –Jerome S. Bruner

46. I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing. — Neil Gaiman

47. America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach, and how we live. — Jane Addams

48. The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. — Abraham Lincoln

49. It’s a mistake to think that once you’re done with school you need never learn anything new. –Sophia Loren

50. It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education is a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks. –Albert Einstein

51. Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree. –Marian Wright

52. Don’t ever dare to take your college as a matter of course – because, like democracy and freedom, many people you’ll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you. — Alice Miller

53. You should have to pass an IQ test before you breed. You have to take a driving test to operate vehicles and an SAT test to get into college. So why dont you have to take some sort of test before you give birth to children? When I am President, that’s the first rule I will institute. –Marilyn Manson

54. College is a refuge from hasty judgment. — Robert Frost

55. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. –Mark Twain

56. A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. — Anonymous

57. The highest result of education is tolerance. — Helen Keller

58. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
— Robert Frost

59. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. — Aristotle

60. Education is not received. It is achieved. — Anonymous

I could go on with these forever, but it’s almost 3 a.m. Besides, I can sense that I’m starting to get my snark on, and when I’m in that kind of mood, I tend to be more than just a little bit mean when it comes to schools and the American educational system in general. And, by “mean,” I mean “MEAN.” As in, it all sucks because it likes sucking and intends to go on sucking as long as the American people continue to allow such suckage to continue. Permissive suckage is actually permitted suckage. Why do we continue to permit it? Our children are too important to entrust to a system that thinks August is a good time to herd kids into small crowded un-airconditioned rooms and expectsthem to be all Yay! and Whoopee! about drilling for standardized tests. And you really don’t want to get me started about self-esteem and behavior. Seriously, you don’t.