And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
Interpretation
A good citizen conforms to societal norms, as shaped by institutions like schools.
This quote by H. L. Mencken critiques the notion of a 'good citizen' as one who adheres strictly to societal norms without questioning or deviating. Mencken suggests that schools are designed to mold young individuals into uniform members of society, thus stifling creativity and individuality in favor of conformity and standardization.
In practice
This quote can be used in an educational seminar to discuss the role of schools in shaping citizenship.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.
When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
Don’t just create content to get credit for being clever — create content that will be helpful, insightful, or interesting for your target audience.
When children and youth are deprived of their right to education, their community is deprived of a sustainable future. It is all the more true with refugees.
Max Weber was right in subscribing to the view that one need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But there is a temptation for us theoretical sociologists to act sometimes as though it is not necessary even to study Caesar in order to understand him. Yet we know that the interplay of theory and research makes both for understanding of the specific case and expansion of the general rule.
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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