"A student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong. A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher's ability to obtain effective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs. . . a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings."
-- Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and educational theorist in Major Categories in the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, page 185, 1956.
"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well -- by creating the international child of the future."
-- Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the childhood International Education Seminar, 1973."
"Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished. . ."
-- Bertrand Russell, quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy and psychology who influenced Hegel and others -- Prussian University in Berlin, 1810.