I have yet to meet a single person from our culture, no matter what his or her educational background, IQ, and specific training, who had powerful transpersonal experiences and continues to subscribe to the materialistic monism of Western science.
I have made education a top priority of this Administration because when we get it right, when every child learns, America will be a more hopeful place.
To attempt social reform, educational reform, industrial expansion, the moral improvement of the race without aiming, first and foremost, at political freedom is the very height of ignorance and futility.
THE TEACHER AS A NECESSARY EVIL. Let us have as few people as possible between the productive minds and the hungry and recipient minds! The middlemen almost unconsciously adulterate the food which they supply. It is because of teachers that so little is learned, and that so badly.
I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a 'matter-of-fact' habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity.
Educational enterprises do not for any length of time remain immune from the struggle of interests for power which is the dominant feature of social life under a class system.