Boggs Educational Center

“In order for the schools to become the center of the community, the community itself with its needs and problems must become the curriculum of the school.”

“Why can’t we engage our children and young people in community building activities with the same audacity with which the civil rights movement engaged them in anti-segregation and anti-discrimination actions?”

“What our children need most is a sense of themselves as change agents and decision makers.”

“Children need to be given a sense of the unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.”

“Our schools must be transformed to provide children with ongoing opportunities to exercise “their resourcefulness to solve the real problems of their communities; working together rather than competitively, with younger children emulating older ones and older children teaching younger ones; experiencing the intrinsic consequences of their actions.”

“By giving our children and young people a better reason to learn than just the individualistic one of getting a job or making money, we would get their cognitive juices flowing.  Learning would come from practice which has always been the best way to learn.”

“Today we need to combine learning with work, political struggle, community service, and even play.”

“Our schools have become custodial or holding institutions for the young people who are no longer needed on the outside for jobs.   The entire school system has become the material basis for jobs for those who keep them in these institutions.  Only when we face up to this reality can we begin the long hard struggle to redefine the fundamental purpose of education, i.e. to make clear that future learning cannot be just for jobs or careers or for earning power, and schools must serve a better purpose than providing jobs for teachers.  Rather all future learning must be for serving the community, governing the cities, and governing the country.”

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically… Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

“I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end or that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community.”

“Education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.  School must represent present life – life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood or on the playground.  Much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life.  It conceives the schools as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed.  The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do.”

“The tragic weakness of the present school is that it endeavors to prepare future members of the social order in a medium in which the conditions of the social spirit are eminently waiting.  The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness … Where active work is going on, all is changed… A spirit of free communication, of interchange of ideas, of suggestions, results…becomes the dominating note.”

“Our present education is highly specialized, one-sided and narrow; it is an education dominated almost entirely by the medieval conception of learning.  It is something which appeals for the most part simply to the intellectual aspects of our natures, our desire to learn, to accumulate information, and to get control of the symbols of learning; not to our impulses and tendencies to make, to do, to create, to produce, whether in the form of utility or of art.”

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

“In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young, adults have two problems to solve.  One is an engineering problem; the other, a metaphysical one.”

“Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one’s actions or change one’s purpose.”

“Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”

“All knowledge begins with a question.”

“The most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to provide them with a sense of coherence in their studies; that is, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn . . . [In modern secular education, the] curriculum is not, in fact, a “course of study” at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects.”

“Children are living messages we send to a time we will not see.”