No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

I have found it; I have discovered the cause of all the misfortunes which befell him. A public school, Joseph, was the cause of all the calamities which he afterwards suffered. Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

Minerva House was ''a finishing establishment for young ladies,'' where some twenty girls of the ages from thirteen to nineteen inclusive, acquired a smattering of everything and a knowledge of nothing.