Topic: Education

Quotes

Sijie Hu, “Survival of the Confucians: social status and fertility in China, 1400- 1900” (2020)

• Education in imperial China promoted intellectual obedience and uniformity, rather than innovation. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, scholars were forbidden to have academic discussions about the Sages’ teachings, not to mention discussions about what should be taught in schools and tested in exams… Emphasizing and expanding of education during this period only imposed more severe intellectual constraints upon a larger population. #

Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (1994)

• Ethnic differences in higher education, occupations, and wages are strikingly diminished after controlling for IQ. Often they vanish. In this sense, America has equalized these central indicators of social success.#
• There is no longer an important technical debate over the conclusion that the cultural content of test items is not the cause of group differences in scores.#
• The common stereotype of the talented-but-disadvantaged-youth-denied-educational-opportunity does not seem to exist in significant numbers any longer.#
• Voltaire’s view that “the lower classes should be guided, not educated,” was typical until this century.#

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

• If one were to seek deliberately to devise a system of recruiting and paying teachers calculated to repel the imaginative and daring and self-confident and to attract the dull and mediocre and uninspiring, he could hardly do better than imitate the system of requiring teaching certificates and enforcing standard salary structures that has developed in the larger city and state-wide systems.#

F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960)

• It may be better even that some children should go without formal education than that they should be killed in fighting over who is to control that education.#