Only when all parents, not just rich ones, have a truly free choice in education, when they can take their children out of a school they don’t like, and have a choice of many others to send them to, or the possibility of starting their own, or of educating their children outside of school altogether–only then will we teachers begin to stop being what most of us still are and if we are honest know we are, which is jailers and baby-sitters, cops without uniforms, and begin to be professionals, freely exercising an important valued, and honored skill and art.
- John Holt
What Do I Do Monday? (New York: Dutton, 1970), p. 265.