The purpose of education...cannot be to control the child's growth to a specific, predetermined end, because any such end must be established by arbitrary authoritarian means; rather the purpose of education must be
to permit the growing principle of life to take its own individual course,
and to facilitate this process by sympathy, encouragement, and challenge...

This humanistic conception of education clearly involves some factual assumptions about the intrinsic nature of man and, in particular, about the centrality to that intrinsic nature of a creative impulse...if these assumptions are indeed correct,
much of contemporary American educational practice is rationally
as well as morally questionable.
- Noam Chomsky