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Education

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Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or skills and character traits.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations · Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations · See also · External links

A

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The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves. ~ John Adams
Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing. ~ John Adams
Buckminster Fuller, the twentieth century philosopher, described the Earth as a spaceship, and he wrote that all humans are really astronauts sharing residence on a planet travelling 60,000 miles an hour. He believed, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody." This is exactly the underlying philosophy that propels the United Nations. Unfortunately, modern educational systems were not built with such a global attitude. Instead, they have been designed first and foremost to develop loyal, national citizens. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with celebrating national heritages and traditions, however, there must also be significant attention devoted to sharing stories from other nations. Schools should help further national goals and interests, but they also must enable us to understand the whole world and our role in it... ~ J. Michael Adams
"Much knowledge of the right sort is a dangerous thing for the poor," might have been the motto put up over the door of the village school in my day. The less book-learning the labourer's lad got stuffed into him, the better for him and the safer for those above him, was what those in authority believed ... They tried to numb his brain, as a preliminary to stunting his body later on, as stunt it they did, by forcing him to work like a beast of burden for a pittance. ~ Joseph Arch
From my grandfather's father, [I learned] to dispense with attendance at public schools, and to enjoy good teachers at home, and to recognize that on such things money should be eagerly spent. ~ Marcus Aurelius
  • You can think of the curriculum as the shadows cast on a wall by the light of education itself as it shines over, under, around, and through the myriad phases of our experience. It is a mistake to be sure to take these shadows for the reality, but they are something that helps us find or grasp or intuit that reality. The false notions that there is a fixed curriculum, that there is a list of things that an educated person ought to know, and that the shadow-exercises on the wall themselves are the content of education—these false notions all come from taking too seriously what was originally a wise recognition—the recognition that the shadows do in fact provide a starting point in our attempt to fully envision reality.
    • Andrew Abbott, “Welcome to the University of Chicago,” Aims of Education Address, September 26, 2002
  • Education doesn’t have aims. It is the aim of other things.
    • Andrew Abbott, “Welcome to the University of Chicago,” Aims of Education Address, September 26, 2002
  • Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
  • Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing. Newton and Locke are examples of the deep sagacity which may be acquired by long habits of thinking and study.
    • John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams (29 October 1775), published Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife, Vol. 1 (1841), ed. Charles Francis Adams, p. 72.
  • The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.
    • [[John Adams], The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, Volume 9, Little, Brown, 1854, p. 540.
  • Buckminster Fuller, the twentieth century philosopher, described the Earth as a spaceship, and he wrote that all humans are really astronauts sharing residence on a planet travelling 60,000 miles an hour. He believed, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody." This is exactly the underlying philosophy that propels the United Nations. Unfortunately, modern educational systems were not built with such a global attitude. Instead, they have been designed first and foremost to develop loyal, national citizens. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with celebrating national heritages and traditions, however, there must also be significant attention devoted to sharing stories from other nations. Schools should help further national goals and interests, but they also must enable us to understand the whole world and our role in it...
  • Having a global education and being a world citizen is the key element for peace and for all elements of progress outlined in the UN Charter. Indeed, that is the foundation for the necessary new skill-set at the conference table. Being able to look at the problems through the eyes of others reduces fears and misunderstandings that breed conflict and confusion. We must learn to work together; we must learn more about each other; and we must come to the table with resolve to solve those problems no single country can address... Through global education, we must prepare world citizens who understand the interconnected nature of our planet and who are willing to act on behalf of people everywhere. We each must spend more time learning about other cultures and other lands. Schools and universities need to introduce more international lessons, expand language programmes, extend study-abroad opportunities, welcome international students, and encourage cross-cultural dialogues. Schools and universities also need to fully employ new technologies to connect students with others throughout the world and introduce different perspectives on the lessons being studied.
  • The object of education is not merely to enable our children to gain their daily bread and to acquire pleasant means of recreation, but that they should know God and serve Him with earnestness and devotion.
  • The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology. ... It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power.
  • "Much knowledge of the right sort is a dangerous thing for the poor," might have been the motto put up over the door of the village school in my day. The less book-learning the labourer's lad got stuffed into him, the better for him and the safer for those above him, was what those in authority believed and acted up to. I daresay they made themselves think somehow or other - perhaps by not thinking - that they were doing their duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call them, when they tried to numb his brain, as a preliminary to stunting his body later on, as stunt it they did, by forcing him to work like a beast of burden for a pittance.
    • Joseph Arch, The Story of his Life Told by Himself (1898), p. 25
  • [The educated differ from the uneducated] as much as the living from the dead.
    • Attributed to Aristotle; reported in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (1942), vol. 1, book 5, section 19, p. 463. Diogenes also credits Aristotle with saying: "Teachers who educated children deserved more honour than parents who merely gave them birth; for bare life is furnished by the one, the other ensures a good life" (p. 463).
  • For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
    And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
    Show’d me the high white star of Truth,
    There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
  • The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
  • From my grandfather's father, [I learned] to dispense with attendance at public schools, and to enjoy good teachers at home, and to recognize that on such things money should be eagerly spent.

B

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What... should be the effort on the part of parents and educators? First, and above everything else, the effort should be made to provide the atmosphere wherein certain qualities can flourish and emerge.
1. An atmosphere of love...
2. An atmosphere of patience...
3. An atmosphere of ordered activity...
4. An atmosphere of understanding... ~ Alice Bailey
Two major ideas should be taught to the children of every country. They are: the value of the individual and the fact of the one humanity. ~ Alice Bailey
One of our immediate educational objectives must be the elimination of the competitive spirit, and the substitution of the co-operative consciousness. ~ Alice Bailey
To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar. ~ Francis Bacon
The main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have those opportunities of higher education which in your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed. ~ Edward Bellamy
To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education! ~ Edward Bellamy
The expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten nor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle which makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds as to education also. ~ Edward Bellamy
  • To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar.
    • Francis Bacon, "Of Studies," in The Essayes or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban (1625) as quoted in Bacon's Essays (1892) p. 128
  • Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that traveleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
    • Francis Bacon,The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625)
  • The world itself is a great fusing pot, out of which the One Humanity is emerging. This necessitates a drastic change in our methods of presenting history and geography. Science has always been universal. Great art and literature have always belonged to the world. It is upon these facts that the education to be given to the children of the world must be built - upon our similarities, our creative achievements, our spiritual idealisms, and our points of contact. Unless this is done, the wounds of the nations will never be healed, and the barriers which have existed for centuries will never be removed... Two major ideas should be taught to the children of every country. They are: the value of the individual and the fact of the one humanity.
    • Alice Bailey Education in the New Age, Lucis Trust Publishing (1954) p. 46/7
  • One of our immediate educational objectives must be the elimination of the competitive spirit, and the substitution of the co-operative consciousness.
    • Alice Bailey Education in the New Age, Lucis Trust Publishing (1954) p. 74
  • A better educational system should, therefore, be worked out which will present the possibilities of human living in such a manner that barriers will be broken down, prejudices removed, and a training given to the developing child which will enable him, when grownup, to live with other men in harmony and goodwill. This can be done, if patience and understanding are developed and if educators realise that "where there is no vision, the people perish". p. 87
  • There is a risk of elevating, by an indiscriminating education, the minds of those doomed to the drudgery of daily labour above their condition, and thereby rendering them discontented and unhappy in their lot.
    • Reverend Andrew Bell, as cited in Education for the Future: The Case for Radical Change (1979), p. 29
  • The main difference is that nowadays all persons equally have those opportunities of higher education which in your day only an infinitesimal portion of the population enjoyed.
  • To educate some to the highest degree, and leave the mass wholly uncultivated, as you did, made the gap between them almost like that between different natural species, which have no means of communication. What could be more inhuman than this consequence of a partial enjoyment of education!
    • Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887
  • The expense of educating ten thousand youth is not ten nor five times that of educating one thousand. The principle which makes all operations on a large scale proportionally cheaper than on a small scale holds as to education also. ** Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887
  • EDUCATION, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
    • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).
  • I have often observed, to my regret, that a widespread prejudice exists with regard to the educability of intelligence. The familiar proverb, "When one is stupid, it is for a long time," seems to be accepted indiscriminately by teachers with a stunted critical judgement. These teacher lose interest in students with low intelligence. Their lack of sympathy and respect is illustrated by their unrestrained comments in the presence of the children: "This child will never achieve anything... He is poorly endowed... He is not intelligent at all." I have heard such rash statements too often. They are repeated daily in primary schools, nor are secondary schools exempt from the charge.
    • Alfred Binet (1909/1975). Modern ideas about children. Translated by Suzanne Heisler. Menlo Park, CA. Les idées modernes sur les enfants, Paris, E. Flammarion, 1909., as cited in: B.R. Hergenhahn. An Introduction to the History of Psychology 2009. p. 312-3
  • What is the real object of modern education? Is it to cultivate and develop the mind in the right direction; to teach the disinherited and hapless people to carry with fortitude the burden of life (allotted them by Karma); to strengthen their will; to inculcate in them the love of one’s neighbor and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood; and thus to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it. And yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education. No one denies it; all your educationalists admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject. But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy, nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer: “The object of modern education is to pass examinations,” a system not to develop right emulation, but to generate and breed jealousy, envy, hatred almost, in young people for one another, and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honors and emoluments instead of kindly feeling.
  • Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves. We would reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum, and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities. We would endeavour to deal with each child as a unit, and to educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development. We should aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish.
    • H.P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy p. 215, (1889)
  • Education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art.
    • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 71
  • Education is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures, but providing a natural continuity between what they feel and what they can and should be.
    • Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: 1988), p. 80
  • Our schools may be wasting precious years by postponing the teaching of many important subjects on the ground that they are too difficult…the foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form.
  • Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.
    By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome.

C

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Inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves quite distinct from the power they give over outward things. ~ William Ellery Channing
He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion. ~ William H. Crogman
  • There's a reason some may say education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right.
  • That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.
  • In the old Ages, when Universities and Schools were first instituted, this function of the schoolmaster, to teach mere speaking, was the natural one. In those healthy times, guided by silent instincts and the monition of Nature, men had from of old been used to teach themselves what it was essential to learn, by the one sure method of learning anything, practical apprenticeship to it. This was the rule for all classes; as it now is the rule, unluckily, for only one class.
  • Education is the strongest weapon available for restricting the questions people ask, controlling what they think, and ensuring that they get their thoughts ‘from above’.
    • John Carroll, Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34
  • Education must have two foundations — morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defence for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists. The one great social principle is to be just both to yourself and to others. If you must love your neighbour as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbour.
  • The common notion has been, that the mass of the people need no other culture than is necessary to fit them for their various trades; and, though this error is passing away, it is far from being exploded. But the ground of a man’s culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nails, or pins. A trade is plainly not the great end of his being, for his mind cannot be shut up in it; his force of thought cannot be exhausted on it. He has faculties to which it gives no action, and deep wants it cannot answer. Poems, and systems of theology and philosophy, which have made some noise in the world, have been wrought at the work-bench and amidst the toils of the field. How often, when the arms are mechanically plying a trade, does the mind, lost in reverie or day-dreams, escape to the ends of the earth! How often does the pious heart of woman mingle the greatest of all thoughts, that of God, with household drudgery! Undoubtedly a man is to perfect himself in his trade, for by it he is to earn his bread and to serve the community. But bread or subsistence is not his highest good; for, if it were, his lot would be harder than that of the inferior animals, for whom nature spreads a table and weaves a wardrobe, without a care of their own. Nor was he made chiefly to minister to the wants of the community. A rational, moral being cannot, without infinite wrong, be converted into a mere instrument of others’ gratification. He is necessarily an end, not a means. A mind, in which are sown the seeds of wisdom, disinterestedness, firmness of purpose, and piety, is worth more than all the outward material interests of a world. It exists for itself, for its own perfection, and must not be enslaved to its own or others’ animal wants.
  • When I speak of the purpose of self-culture, I mean that it should be sincere. In other words, we must make self-culture really and truly our end, or choose it for its own sake, and not merely as a means or instrument of something else. And here I touch a common and very pernicious error. Not a few persons desire to improve themselves only to get property and to rise in the world; but such do not properly choose improvement, but something outward and foreign to themselves; and so low an impulse can produce only a stinted, partial, uncertain growth. A man, as I have said, is to cultivate himself because he is a man. He is to start with the conviction that there is something greater within him than in the whole material creation, than in all the worlds which press on the eye and ear; and that inward improvements have a worth and dignity in themselves quite distinct from the power they give over outward things. Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself. If he knows no higher use of his mind than to invent and drudge for his body, his case is desperate as far as culture is concerned.
  • Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
  • What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. […] What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.
    • G. K. Chesterton, "Small Property and Government" (July 5, 1924), in Collected Works: Volume XXXIII: The Illustrated London News 1923–1925, ed. Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 362
  • In part, again, these changes are unconscious. Public opinion is formed and expressed by machinery. The newspapers do an immense amount of thinking for the average man and woman. In fact they supply them with such a continuous stream of standardized opinion, borne along upon an equally inexhaustible flood of news and sensation, collected from every part of the world every hour of the day, that there is neither the need nor the leisure for personal reflection. All this is but a part of a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial. It produces enormous numbers of standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party. It may eventually lead to a reasonable, urbane and highly serviceable society. It may draw in its wake a mass culture enjoyed by countless millions to whom such pleasures were formerly unknown. We must not forget the enormous circulations at cheap prices of the greatest books of the world, which is a feature of modern life in civilized countries, and nowhere more than in the United States. But this great diffusion of knowledge, information and light reading of all kinds may, while it opens new pleasures to humanity and appreciably raises the general level of intelligence, be destructive of those conditions of personal stress and mental effort to which the masterpieces of the human mind are due.
  • Neither the black boy nor the white will ever be educated in the best and broadest sense of the term who seeks an education merely to reach an office, for, as in nature a stream never rises higher than its source, so in life men never rise higher than their ideals. The education that merely seeks an office must of necessity be limited to the dimensions of that office.
    • William H. Crogman, "The Importance of Correct Ideals" (1892), in Talks for the Times (1896), p. 281
  • The place-seeker will resort to methods from which self-respecting men would shrink with as much aversion as the ancient Jew shrank from contact with the leper. The true purpose of education is not office. "The true purpose of education," says one, "is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop to their fullest extent the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us." He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion.
    • William H. Crogman, "The Importance of Correct Ideals" (1892), in Talks for the Times (1896), p. 282

D

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  • If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man. I am quite certain that the more the question of crime and its treatment is studied the less faith men have in punishment.
  • If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
  • Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.
    • Democritus (ca. 4th century BC). Tr. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1948.
  • I think one of the great tragedies of my own education … was that the science was denuded of all the passion and the feeling.
  • In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey.
    • William Duane, "Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky," 1822.
  • I hope we still have some bright twelve-year-olds who are interested in science. We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives on preparing for examinations.
    • Freeman Dyson, “Butterflies and Superstrings” in Timothy Ferris (ed.) The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics (p. 135)

E

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  • With the proper understanding of the economic system, the workers will soon find means to end that system, and to raise on its ruins a development of society having for its goal the benefit of the whole, instead of a part, of the community.
    • William Earsman, The Proletariat and Education: The Necessity for Labor Colleges (1920)
  • How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them. Indeed, one should not be surprised at this.
    • Albert Einstein, “Ernst Mach,” Physikalische Zeitschrift (1916) 17, pp. 101-102, a memorial notice for Ernst Mach, as quoted by Don Howard, "Albert Einstein on the Relationship between Philosophy and Physics."
  • All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. It is no mere chance that our older universities developed from clerical schools. Both churches and universities — insofar as they live up to their true function — serve the ennoblement of the individual. They seek to fulfill this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute force.
    • Albert Einstein, "Moral Decay" (1937); published in Out of My Later Years (1950)
  • Most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering people... appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution... production is carried on for profit, not for use.... The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness... This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success... The education of the individual... would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success...
  • It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.
    • Albert Einstein; quoted in "Autobiographical Notes", Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Paul Schilpp, ed. (1951), pp. 17-19.
  • The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives.
  • Parents thought it was enough to bring their children into the world and to shower them with riches, but had no interest in their education. There are severe laws against people who expose their children and abandon them in some forest to be devoured by wild animals. But is there any form of exposure more cruel than to abandon to bestial impulses children whom nature intended to be raised according to upright principles to live a good life? If there existed a Thessalian witch who had the power and the desire to transform your son into a swine or a wolf, would you not think that no punishment could be too severe for her? But what you find revolting in her, you eagerly practise yourself. Lust is a hideous brute; extravagance is a devouring and insatiable monster; drunkenness is a savage beast; anger is a fearful creature; and ambition is a ghastly animal. Anyone who fails to instil into his child, from his earliest years onwards, a love of good and a hatred of evil is, in fact, exposing him to these cruel monsters.
    • Erasmus, “On Education for Children,” The Erasmus Reader (University of Toronto Press: 1990), p. 74

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Our school systems are all nonsynergetic. We take the whole child and fractionate the scope of his or her comprehending... to become preoccupied with elements or isolated facts only... We may well ask how it happened that the entire scheme of advanced education is devoted exclusively to ever narrower specialization. We find that the historical beginnings of schools and tutoring were established, and economically supported by illiterate and vastly ambitious warlords who required a wide variety of brain slaves with which to logistically and ballistically overwhelm those who opposed their expansion of physical conquest... The warlord made all those about him differentiators and reserved the function of integration to himself. ~ Buckminster Fuller
The Great Pirates said to all their lieutenants around the world, “Any time bright young people show up, I’d like to know about it, because we need bright men... when the next bright boy was brought before him the King was to say, “I’m going to make you my Royal Treasurer,” and so forth. Then the Pirate said to the king, “You will finally say to all of them: ‘But each of you must mind your own business or off go your heads. I’m the only one who minds everbody’s business ”This is the way schools began — as the royal tutorial schools... I am not being facetious... This is the beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual specialization. ~ Buckminster Fuller
  • Remarquez un grand défaut des éducations ordinaires: on met tout le plaisir d'un côté , et tout l'ennui de l'autre; tout l'ennui dans l'étude, tout le plaisir dans les divertissements.
    • The greatest defect of common education is, that we are in the habit of putting pleasure all on one side, and weariness on the other; all weariness in study, all pleasure in idleness.
      • François Fénelon De l'éducation des filles, ch. 5, cited from De l’éducation des filles, dialogues des morts et opuscules divers (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1857) p. 21; translation from Selections from the Writings of Fénelon (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little and Wilkins, 1829) p. 72.
  • In a vibrant and emergent culture, rather than having conflicts between nations, the challenges we will face will be overcoming scarcity, restructuring damaged environments, creating innovative technologies, increasing agricultural yield, improving communications, building communications between nations, sharing technologies, and living a meaningful life... When education and resources are available to all without a price tag, there will be no limit to human potential. p.81
  • The process of education has naturally enough been the basis of hope for the perdurance of our democracy on the part of all our great leaders, from Thomas Jefferson onwards. To regard teachers—in our entire educational system, from the primary grades to the university—as the priests of our democracy is therefore not to indulge in hyperbole. It is the special task of teachers to foster those habits of open-mindedness and critical inquiry which alone make for responsible citizens, who, in turn, make possible an enlightened and effective public opinion. Teachers must fulfill their function by precept and practice, by the very atmosphere which they generate; they must be exemplars of open-mindedness and free inquiry. They cannot carry out their noble task if the conditions for the practice of a responsible and critical mind are denied to them.
  • The education of young people at the present day ... does not prepare them for the aggressiveness of which they are destined to become the objects. In sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation, education is behaving as though one were to equip people on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes. In this it becomes evident that a certain misuse is being made of ethical demands. The strictness of those demands would not do so much harm if education were to say: 'This is how men ought to be, in order to be happy and to make others happy; but you have to reckon on their not being like that.' Instead of this the young are made to believe that everyone else fulfills those ethical demands -- that is, that everyone else is virtuous. It is on this that the demand is based that the young, too, shall become virtuous.
  • The great top pirates of the world, realizing that dull people were innocuous and that the only people who could contrive to displace the supreme pirates were the bright ones, set about to apply their grand strategy of anticipatory divide and conquer to solve that situation comprehensively. The Great Pirate came into each of the various lands where he either acquired or sold goods profitably and picked the strongest man there to be his local head man. The Pirate’s picked man became the Pirate’s general manager of the local realm. If the Great Pirate's local strong man in a given land had not already done so, the Great Pirate told him to proclaim himself king. Despite the local head man’s secret subservience to him, the Great Pirate allowed and counted upon his king-stooge to convince his countrymen that he, the local king, was indeed the head man of all men -the god—ordained ruler. To guarantee that sovereign claim the Pirates gave their stooge-kings secret lines of supplies which provided everything required to enforce the sovereign claim. The more massively bejewelled the king’s gold crown, and the more visible his court and castle, the less visible was his pirate master.
  • The Great Pirates said to all their lieutenants around the world, “Any time bright young people show up, I’d like to know about it, be cause we need bright men.” So each time the Pirate came into port the local king-ruler would mention that he had some bright, young men whose capabilities and thinking shone out in the community. The Great Pirate would say to the king, "All right, you summon them and deal with them as follows: As each young man is brought forward you say to him, young man, you are very bright. I’m going to assign you to a great history tutor and in due course if you study well and learn enough I’m going to make you my Royal Historian, but you’ve got to pass many examinations by both your teacher and myself/ ” And when the next bright boy was brought before him the King was to say, “I’m going to make you my Royal Treasurer,” and so forth. Then the Pirate said to the king, “You will finally say to all of them: ‘But each of you must mind your own business or off go your heads. I’m the only one who minds every¬ body’s business ”
  • This is the way schools began—as the royal tutorial schools. You realize, I hope, that I am not being facetious. That is it. This is the beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual specialization. Of course, it took great wealth to start schools, to have great teachers, and to house, clothe, feed, and cultivate both teachers and students.

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Even if the world progresses generally, youth will always begin at the beginning, and the epochs of the world's cultivation will be repeated in the individual. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Most often people seek in life occasions for persisting in their opinions rather than for educating themselves.
    • André Gide, “An Unprejudiced Mind,” Pretexts, J. O’Brien, ed. (1964) p. 311
  • Teaching, as well as preaching, to which it is allied, is certainly a work belonging to the active life, but it derives in a way from the very fullness of contemplation
  • Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.
    • Gail Godwin, as cited in Robert Byrne's The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said #766
  • As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
  • Nicht vor Irrthum zu bewahren, ist die Pflicht des Menschenerziehers, sondern den Irrenten zu leiten, ja, ihn seinen Irrthum aus vollen Bechern ausschlürfen zu lassen, das ist Weisheit der Lehrer. Wer seinen Irrthum nur kostet, hält lange damit Haus, er freuet sich dessen als eines seltenen Glücks; aber wer ihn ganz erschöpft, der muß ihn kennen lernen, wenn er nicht wahnsinnig ist.
    • Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups. That is the wisdom of teachers. He who merely tastes of his error will keep house with it for a long time. … But he who drains it to the dregs will have to get to know it.
  • Even if the world progresses generally, youth will always begin at the beginning, and the epochs of the world's cultivation will be repeated in the individual.
  • Everything is upside down. All scientific evidence points to a model of the most efficient human learning as being completely individual. Humans, from infants to the elderly, learn in their own style, in their own time, driven by curiosity. February tenth is not the day that every third-grader in the country is ready to learn their four times table, but that’s how it’s been taught for a hundred years. Without teachers’ unions, it was easy to replace teachers with teacher-technicians. They only know scripts; they don’t know anything about how children learn. They have a few layers of how to keep everyone on the same page; that’s all. If that doesn’t work, then they fail the children, hold them back to go through the same fruitless exercises. So one key move is to take education out of the hands of business and put it into the hands of kids and of educators, in that order.
  • Elitism is repulsive when based upon external and artificial limitations like race, gender, or social class. Repulsive and utterly false—for that spark of genius is randomly distributed across all cruel barriers of our social prejudice. We therefore must grant access—and encouragement—to everyone; and must be increasingly vigilant, and tirelessly attentive, in providing such opportunities to all children. We will have no justice until this kind of equality can be attained. But if only a small minority respond, and these are our best and brightest of all races, classes, and genders, shall we deny them the pinnacle of their soul's striving because all their colleagues prefer passivity and flashing lights? Let them lift their eyes to hills of books, and at least a few museums that display the full magic of nature's variety. What is wrong with this truly democratic form of elistim?
    • Stephen Jay Gould, "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History (1995)
  • The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.
    • Antonio Gramsci, cited in Davidson's (1977) Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography. London: Merlin Press., p. 77.
  • I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.
    • Edvard Grieg; quoted in Henry T. Fink, Grieg and His Music (1929), page 8.

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Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty? It's a problem in biochemistry and adult education. ~ Aldous Huxley
  • Education is the factory that turns animals into human beings. […] If women are educated, that means their children will be too. If the people of the world want to solve the hard problems in Afghanistan — kidnapping, beheadings, crime and even al-Qaeda — they should invest in [our] education.
  • Education is a means of sharpening the mind of man both spiritually and intellectually. It is a two-edged sword that can be used either for the progress of mankind or for its destruction. That is why it has been Our constant desire and endeavor to develop our education for the benefit of mankind.
    • Haile Selassie, in a University Graduation address (2 July 1963), published in Important Utterances of H. I. M. Emperor Haile Selassie I, 1963-1972 (1972), p. 22
  • The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.
    • Tom Heehler, The Well-Spoken Thesaurus (Sourcebooks 2011).
  • The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
    • Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (2006), #32
  • The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history.
    Forty years ago the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead thought it self-evident that you would get a good government if you took power out of the hands of the acquisitive and gave it to the learned and the cultivated. At present, a child in kindergarten knows better than that.
  • What we need is to justify coercion, paternalistic control, blame, scolding, and punishment - all of which are less evident in trigonometry class than in a fourth grade learning long division.(...) I have argued that blame, scolding, and punishment in public schools - what I have called "the ordeal" - can be successfully defended. Students have a duty to learn, and can be held responsible for violating whatever rules, policies, or instructions are enforced to ensure that they do so.
    • Charles Howell - Syracuse University: Education, Punishment, and Responsibility
  • Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. ... As soon as I learned from my mother that there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher,' not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled.
    • Fred Hoyle, The Small World of Fred Hoyle: an Autobiography (1986)
  • One purpose of education is to draw out the elements of our common human nature. These elements are the same in any time or place. The notion of educating a man to live in any particular time or place, to adjust him to any particular environment, is therefore foreign to a true conception of education.
    Education implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence education should be everywhere the same.
    • H. Gordon Hullfish, Philip G. Smith, Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education (1961) p. 129.
  • Even in kindergarten, children should learn – and experience – the fundamental human rights values of respect, equality and justice. From the earliest age, human rights education should be infused throughout the program of every school – in curricula and textbooks, policies, the training of teaching personnel, pedagogical methods and the overall learning environment.
    Children need to learn what bigotry and chauvinism are, and the evil they can produce. They need to learn that blind obedience can be exploited by authority figures for wicked ends. They should also learn that they are not exceptional because of where they were born, how they look, what passport they carry, or the social class, caste or creed of their parents; they should learn that no-one is intrinsically superior to her or his fellow human beings.
    Children can learn to recognise their own biases, and correct them. They can learn to redirect their own aggressive impulses and use non-violent means to resolve disputes. They can learn to be inspired by the courage of the pacifiers and by those who assist, not those who destroy. They can be guided by human rights education to make informed choices in life, to approach situations with critical and independent thought, and to empathise with other points of view.
  • Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty? It's a problem in biochemistry and adult education.
    • Aldous Huxley, in an interview by Raymond Fraser and George Wickes for The Paris Review, Issue 23, Spring 1960.
  • Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.
    • Aldous Huxley, letter to George Orwell (Smith, Grover (1969). Letters of Aldous Huxley. Chatto & Windus).

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  • Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue's responsibility until it engulfs his pupils' lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring. We hope to contribute concepts needed by those who conduct such counterfoil research on education — and also to those who seek alternatives to other established service industries.
    • Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971) Introduction (November 1970).

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  • Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for another in which education begins again... He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the Republic the involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws... Still, we observe in him the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than ten thousand eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest; the second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual, and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good. The world of sense is still depreciated and identified with opinion, though omitted to be a shadow of the true. In the Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education; the multitude are hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do ... he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.
    • Benjamin Jowett, "Introduction and Analyisis," (1892) p. cc, The Dialogues of Plato: Republic. Timaeus. Critias. Vol. 3 The Republic
  • As a rule the concept of education is associated with children or young people, and although the accent should primarily lie in this quarter, because of the need of preparing them for life's experiences, the wise man will recognize that his education can never be regarded as fully completed. The deeper truths of life can in fact only be learned after reaching maturity, and after gaining some measure of life experience based on earlier education.
  • Effective education should lead to a sense of synthesis and of recognition of the bonds and relations stretching beyond family ties, to include the local community, then the nation, and eventually encompassing world relationships, and thus all of humanity. This training should begin by suitable preparation for parenthood and good citizenship, but should not end before the pupil has been brought to an evaluation of the position and responsibilities he carries in relation to the rest of the world of men. This training would basically be psychological, and should convey a reasonable understanding of man's own constitution and functioning, and how this relationship stretches beyond the self, eventually becoming all-inclusive. He should also be made aware that the main causes of disharmony are based on selfishness, possessiveness, intolerance, separativeness and the lack of love.
  • One of the first educational objectives should be to eliminate the competitive spirit and its substitution with a spirit of loving cooperation... What is needed is to surround the child with an atmosphere which will foster a sense of responsibility and which will set him free from the inhibitions generated by a perpetual sense of fear of life, and which then becomes the stimulus for competition. These qualities of responsibility and goodwill will be encouraged by stressing a new approach in the child's education: (a) Surrounding him with an atmosphere of love and trust, which will suppress the causes of timidity and will largely contribute to cast out fear. This love must be based on true and deep compassion and tenderness and not on emotional demonstrations. It should lead to courteous treatment of the child, and the expectation of equal courtesy to others.... (b) An atmosphere of patience will contribute considerably towards engendering the rudiments of responsibility... (c) For the developing child an atmosphere of understanding is absolutely essential.
  • So often older people, by their negative approach, are apt to foster, even from very early years, a sense of wrong-doing with children. The emphasis is constantly laid on petty little things, which may be annoying but are not basically wrong. To the child they are, however, being blown up and represented out of all proportion. Psychologically this must have an adverse effect on the child's character, developing a warped sense of values, and an attitude of defensive resistance towards its elders. Instead of a purely negative attitude, one should reason with a child, explaining relative values and the reasons for the state of affairs, and the natural consequence of actions. In this way the elementary principles of the Law of Cause and Effect should also be introduced, and it will be found that such explanations will inevitably evoke response and build self-respect, confidence and responsibility.

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The purpose of education is not merely to advance the economic self-interest of its graduates. The people have supported their colleges and universities and their schools because they recognize how important it is to the maintenance of a free society that its citizens be well educated. ~ John F. Kennedy
Education is, after all, something thoroughly "aristocratic" in the intellectual sense. ~ Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
  • Man must develop his tendency towards the good.
  • It was imagined that experiments in education were not necessary; and that, whether any thing in it was good or bad, could be judged of by the reason. But this was a great mistake; experience shows very often that results are produced precisely the opposite to those which had been expected. We also see from experiment that one generation cannot work out a complete plan of education.
  • When brought to the proletariat from the capitalist class, science is invariably adapted to suit capitalist interests. What the proletariat needs is a scientific understanding of its own position in society. That kind of science a worker cannot obtain in the officially and socially approved manner. The proletarian himself must develop his own theory. For this reason he must be completely self-taught.
  • * This college, therefore, from its earliest beginnings, has recognized and its graduates have recognized, that the purpose of education is not merely to advance the economic self-interest of its graduates. The people of California, as much if not more than the people of any other State, have supported their colleges and universities and their schools because they recognize how important it is to the maintenance of a free society that its citizens be well educated.
    • John F. Kennedy, Address at the University of California at Berkeley (March 23, 1962). Delivered at Memorial Stadium at the University of California in Berkeley, California. Source: Address at the University of California at Berkeley, March 23, 1962. Boston: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. Archived from the original on June 24, 2024.
  • Education does have a great role to play in this period of transition. But it is not either education or legislation; it is both education and legislation. [...] We must depend on religion and education to change bad internal attitudes, but we need legislation to control the external effects of those bad internal attitudes.
  • Education is, after all, something thoroughly "aristocratic" in the intellectual sense. Already the Ancients were aware of the fact that there are different degrees of knowledge, but ochlocracy spread the conviction that everybody with the proper educational facilities is able to learn everything. The very idea of genius or inborn talents as disequalizing factors must be repulsive to people who not only believe that we are (theologically speaking) created as equals but that we also remain equals all through our lifetime. There naturally are a fair number of scholars and educators who have protested desperately against the low standards in American higher education as well as against the view that a true education should teach "how to make a living" instead of helping the student to solve his problem "how to live" by giving him the philosophical and cultural elements for a cultured existence.

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Education is life—not a mere preparation for an unknown kind of future living. ~ Eduard C. Lindeman
  • Give the children of the poor that portion of education which will enable them to know their own resources ; which will cultivate in them an onward-looking hope, and give them rational amusement in their leisure hours : this, and this only, will work out that moral revolution, which is the legislator's noblest purpose.
  • This is a school in which no pupil ever fails; every one must go on to the end.
  • Education is life—not a mere preparation for an unknown kind of future living. Consequently all static concepts of education which relegate the learning process to the period of youth are abandoned. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings.
  • As educators, rather than raising your voices over the rustling of our chains, take them off, uncuff us, unencumbered by the lumbering weight of poverty and privilege, policy and ignorance. ... If you take the time to connect the dots, you can plot the true shape of their genius, shining in their darkest hour. ... Beneath their masks and their mischiefs exists an authentic frustration at enslavement to your standardized assessments. At the core, none of us were meant to be common. We were meant to comets, leaving our mark as we crash into everything. ... I’ve been the black hole in the classroom for far too long, absorbing everything without allowing my light to escape, but those days are done. I belong among the stars and so do you.
  • The method of the Schools having allowed and encouraged men to oppose and resist evident truth till they are baffled, i.e. till they are reduced to contradict themselves, or some established principles: it is no wonder that they should not in civil conversation be ashamed of that which in the Schools is counted a virtue and a glory, viz. obstinately to maintain that side of the question they have chosen, whether true or false, to the last extremity; even after conviction. A strange way to attain truth and knowledge: and that which I think the rational part of mankind, not corrupted by education, could scare believe should ever be admitted amongst the lovers of truth, and students of religion or nature, or introduced into the seminaries of those who are to propegate the truths of religion or philosophy amongst the ignorant and unconvinced. How much such a way of learning is like to turn young men's minds from the sincere search and love of truth; nay, and to make them doubt whether there is any such thing, or, at least, worth the adhering to, I shall not now inquire. This I think, that, bating those places, which brought the Peripatetic Philosophy into their schools, where it continued many ages, without teaching the world anything but the art of wrangling, these maxims were nowhere thought the foundations on which the sciences were built, nor the great helps to the advancement of knowledge.]
    • John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Book IV Of Knowledge And Probability Chapter 7 Of Maxims
  • I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God's word becomes corrupt. Because of this we can see what kind of people they become in the universities and what they are like now. Nobody is to blame for this except the pope, the bishops, and the prelates, who are all charged with training young people. The universities only ought to turn out men who are experts in the Holy Scriptures, men who can become bishops and priests, and stand in the front line against heretics, the devil, and all the world. But where do you find that? I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.
    • Martin Luther To the Christian Nobility of the German States (1520), translated by Charles M. Jacobs, reported in rev. James Atkinson, The Christian in Society, I (Luther’s Works, ed. James Atkinson, vol. 44), p. 207 (1966).
  • A lot of people must have told you by now that it's important to get a good education, so you can find a promising career that pays you a decent wage. But they may not have told you that in the long run, it's not just how much money you make that will determine your future prosperity. It's how much of that money you put to work by saving it and investing it.

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The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. ~ H.L. Mencken
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. ~ John Stuart Mill
  • Socrates ... made all his philosophy subservient to morality, ... and took more pains to rectify the tempers than replenish the understandings of his pupils; and looked upon all knowledge as useless speculation that was not brought to this end, to make us wiser and better men. And, without doubt, if in the academy the youth has once happily learned the great art of managing his temper, governing his passions, and guarding his foibles, he will find a more solid advantage from it in afterlife, than he could expect from the best acquaintance with all the systems of ancient and modern philosophy.
  • Whence is it that moral philosophy, which was so carefully cultivated in the ancient academy, should be forced in the modern to give place to natural, that was originally designed to be subservient to it? Which is to exalt the hand-maid into the place of mistress. This appears not only a preposterous, but a pernicious method of institution; for as the mind takes a turn of thought in future life, suitable to the tincture it hath received in youth, it will naturally conclude that there is no necessity to regard, or at least to lay any stress upon what was never inculcated upon it as a matter of importance then: and so will grow up in a neglect or disesteem of those things which are more necessary to make a person a wise and truly understanding man than all those rudiments of science he brought with him from the school or college.
  • Surely a University is the very place where we should be able to overcome this tendency of men to become, as it were, granulated into small worlds, which are all the more worldly for their very smallness. We lose the advantage of having men of varied pursuits collected into one body, if we do not endeavour to imbibe some of the spirit even of those whose special branch of learning is different from our own.
  • An uneducated population may be degraded; a population educated, but not in righteousness, will be ungovernable. The one may be slaves, the other must be tyrants.
    • Henry Melvill (1798–1871). Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364.
  • If the end of education is to foster the love of truth, this love cannot be presupposed in the means. The means must rather be based on a resourceful pedagogical rhetoric that, knowing how initially resistant or impervious we all are to philosophic truth, necessarily makes use of motives other than love of truth and of techniques other than “saying exactly what you mean.” That is why, for example, the earlier, classical tradition of rationalism recognized the inescapable need to speak in philosophical poems and dialogues as well as treatises.
    • Arthur Melzer, “On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, Issue 4, November 2007, p. 1018
  • A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
  • I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
  • Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.
  • Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
    • Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution, Ludwig von Mises Institute (2007) p. 263. First published by Yale University Press, 1957
  • If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future.
    • Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind (1949), Part I : The Child's Part in World Reconstruction, p. 4
  • Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore.
  • The Prophet said, "He who has a slave-girl and teaches her good manners and improves her education and then manumits and marries her, will get a double reward; and any slave who observes Allah's right and his master's right will get a double reward."
    • Muhammad narrated Abu Musa Al-Ashari, in Bukhari, Volume 3, Book 46, Number 723
  • There is always the difficulty of difficulties, that of inducing the child to lend himself to all this endeavor, and to second the master, and not show himself recalcitrant to the efforts made on his behalf. For this reason the _moral_ education is the point of departure; before all things, it is necessary to _discipline_ the class. The pupils must be induced to _second_ the master's efforts, if not by love, then by force. Failing this point of departure, all education and instruction would be _impossible_, and the school _useless_.
    • Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education (available on Gutenberg.org).

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That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mould the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
  • That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.
  • I always believed that at some time fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself. I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself. Then I asked myself: what would be the principles by which he would educate you?—and I reflected on what he might say about the two educational maxims which are being hatched in our time. One of them demands that the educator should quickly recognize the real strength of his pupil and then direct all his efforts and energy and heat at them so as to help that one virtue to attain true maturity and fruitfulness. The other maxim, on the contrary, requires that the educator should draw forth and nourish all the forces which exist in his pupil and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. ... But where do we discover a harmonious whole at all, a simultaneous sounding of many voices in one nature, if not in such men as Cellini, men in whom everything, knowledge, desire, love, hate, strives towards a central point, a root force, and where a harmonious system is constructed through the compelling domination of this living centre? And so perhaps these two maxims are not opposites at all? Perhaps the one simply says that man should have a center and the other than he should also have a periphery? That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mould the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion.
  • What are our schools for if not for indoctrination against communism?
    • Richard Nixon, Speech before a meeting of San Diego educators during the 1962 gubernatorial election, cited in In Conflict and Order: Understanding Society, p. 153
  • Every stage of education begins with childhood. That is why the most educated person on earth so much resembles a child.
    • Novalis, “Miscellaneous Observations,” Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #48

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When girls go to school -- this is one of the most direct measures of whether a nation is going to develop effectively is how it treats its women. When a girl goes to school, it doesn’t just open up her young mind, it benefits all of us -- because maybe someday she’ll start her own business, or invent a new technology, or cure a disease. ~ Barack Obama

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A meaningless master’s degree has kept many from becoming true masters. Believing others rather than themselves, and believing to be what they were cried up to be but really were not, they never became what they could have become. ~ Petrarch
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. ~ Plutarch
  • You can only teach learners. You can’t teach any subject to anybody who isn’t there to want to know.
  • In the distant past, in India as in many other countries, all recognized branches of learning had had a religious and philosophic bias. Education was not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the acquisition of wealth. It was an initiation into the life of spirit, a training of the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.
  • A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
    • Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine New Brunswick: NJ, Transaction Publishers (2009), first published 1943, p. 258
  • Be he religious or not, [modern man's] secular education has enabled him to think and speak, and conduct a dialogue with dignity.
  • Multis ne magistri veri essent magisterii falsum nomen obstitit: dum de se plus omnibus quam sibi dumque quod dicebantur, sed non erant, esse crediderunt, quod esse poterant non fuerunt.
    • A meaningless master’s degree has kept many from becoming true masters. Believing others rather than themselves, and believing to be what they were cried up to be but really were not, they never became what they could have become.
  • I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
  • We must encourage [each other] once we have grasped the basic points to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grown. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting no more and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
  • It was a clever saying of Bion, the philosopher, that, just as the suitors, not being able to approach Penelope, consorted with her maid-servants, so also do those who are not able to attain to philosophy wear themselves to a shadow over the other kinds of education which have no value.
    • Plutarch, “The education of children,” Moralia, 7D
  • Men must be taught as if you taught them not
    And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
  • This education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.
  • One of the main things about teaching is not what you say but what you don't say. When you hear someone play, you have to work out the way they do things naturally and then leave them alone, because you want the naturalness to be there still.
  • The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

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We are on the eve of a new approach to and reconstruction of the entire school education... new methods in the entire system of education will have to be devised. Precisely training in synthesized thinking will become an urgent necessity.
~ Helena Roerich
...the schools... occupied mainly with the physical development of youth to the detriment of their mental development... the excessive enthusiasm for sports leads to the coarsening of character, to mental degeneration, and to new diseases.
~ Helena Roerich
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
~ Bertrand Russell
  • Formal education teaches how to stand, but to see the rainbow you must come out and walk many steps on your own.
    • Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
  • Education is beautification of the inner world and the outer world.
    • Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power
  • Education is unfolding the wings of head and heart together. The job of a teacher is to push the students out of the nest to strengthen their wings.
    • Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion (2015) p. 62
  • The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.
  • Education is not the idea of adding to persons something they do not possess. It is not writing anew on an empty blackboard. It is regaining the consciousness of something that was lost by recalling it to memory.
    Even better: it is finding what is valuable but is deeply buried within us, and bring it to the surface.
  • Nobody can argue against the advantage of a good education for children. If from the earliest possible age they are taught to understand the various unfoldings of nature revealed before them, eventually they can discern the subtlest manifestations; verily, not in ignorance, but with full perception of all the necessary scientific conditions. All this is mentioned in the books of the Teaching. Besides, is not the whole Teaching directed toward the broadening of consciousness? But merely to concentrate on the tip of one's nose or on one's navel, without striving to spiritual synthesis... will lead to idiocy or obsession.
  • The first task which faces women is to insist in all countries upon full rights and equal education with men; to try with all their might to develop their thinking faculties, and, above all, to learn to stand on their own feet without leaning altogether upon men. In the West there are many fields which are now available to women, and one must admit that they are quite successful...
  • It is not the comfort of youth that we should be concerned with, but with equipping them better for the life struggle which is an immutable cosmic law. That is why, in the structure of the New Epoch, the main factor of the national welfare will be the education and upbringing of people. It is urgently necessary to pay attention to the betterment and broadening of school programs, especially those of the elementary and high schools... From very childhood, respect for knowledge should be taught. In schools, this true and only propeller of evolution should be pointed out through concrete historical examples. It is necessary to reach a state where the aspiration to and respect for science enter our flesh and blood and become an inalienable part of our daily life. Only then will it be possible to say that the nations have entered the path of culture. Only then will the bearers of knowledge be considered as true treasures, not only of any one particular country but of the whole world. Then it will be possible to speak about the acceleration of evolution and bringing into life the dreams of communication with the far-off worlds. Thus, we may repeat the words of a thinker and leader who said, "First, all should learn; second, all should learn; third, all should learn; and then see that knowledge does not become a dead letter, but is applied in life."
  • Indeed, the most urgent, the most essential task is the education of children and youth... It is usually customary to confuse education with upbringing, but it is time to understand that school education, as it is established in most cases, not only does not contribute to the moral upbringing of youth, but acts inversely. In the Anglo-Saxon countries the schools are occupied mainly with the physical development of youth to the detriment of their mental development. But the excessive enthusiasm for sports leads to the coarsening of character, to mental degeneration, and to new diseases. True, not much better is the situation in home education under the conditions of the modern family. Therefore, it is time to pay most serious attention to the grave and derelict situation of children and youth from the moral point of view. Many lofty concepts are completely out of habitual use, having been replaced by everyday formulas for the easy achievement of the most vulgar comforts and status...The program of education is as broad as life itself. The possibilities for improvement are inexhaustible...
  • We are on the eve of a new approach to and reconstruction of the entire school education... The quantity and speed of new discoveries in all domains of science grow so rapidly that soon contemporary school education will not be able to walk in step with and respond to the new attainments and demands of the time; new methods in the entire system of education will have to be devised...
  • Education is crucial in any type of society for the preservation of the lives of its members and the maintenance of the social structure. Under certain circumstances, education also promotes social change. The greater portion of that education is informal, being acquired by the young from the example and behavior of elders in the society. Under normal circumstances, education grows out of the environment; the learning process being directly related to the pattern of work in the society.
  • We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them. We need comprehensive workman’s compensation acts, both State and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, and, especially, we need in our common schools not merely education in book-learning, but also practical training for daily life and work.
    • Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism (1910), speech at Osawatomie, Kansas (31 August 1910), published in The New Nationalism (1910).
  • It is very strange, that, ever since mankind have taken it into their heads to trouble themselves so much about the education of children, they should never have thought of any other instruments to effect their purpose than those of emulation, jealousy, envy, pride, covetousness, and servile fear—all passions the most dangerous, the most apt to ferment, and the most fit to corrupt the soul, even before the body is formed. With every premature instruction we instil into the head, we implant a vice in the bottom of the heart.
  • Early socialists and latter-day mercantilists and interventionist were united in the battle for state-controlled education as a means of social control. The uncontrolled mind was a dangerous mind.
    • Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of American Education: Studies in the History of the Philosophy of Education, Phillpsburg, NJ, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company (1963) p. 35
  • I receive many letters from parents respecting the education of their children. In the mass of these letters I am always struck by the precedence which the idea of a “position in life” takes above all other thoughts in the parents’—more especially in the mothers’—minds. “The education befitting such and such a station in life”—this is the phrase, this the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, an education good in itself, … but, an education … “which shall lead to advancement in life;—this we pray for on bent knees—and this is all we pray for.” It never seems to occur to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself, is advancement in life.
  • There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that is education.
  • We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
  • I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
  • Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
    • Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Chapter XXI: Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, p. 722.

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  • Every uneducated person is a caricature of themselves.
Every uneducated person is a caricature of themselves.
~ Friedrich Schlegel
Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
A liberal education ... considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection. ~ John Lancaster Spalding
What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action? ~ Louis Sullivan
  • The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their thoughts.
  • Truth that has been merely learned is like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a waxen nose; at best, like a nose made out of another’s flesh; it adheres to us only because it is put on. But truth acquired by thinking of our own is like a natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. This is the fundamental difference between the thinker and the mere man of learning.
  • If education or warning were of any avail, how could Seneca's pupil be a Nero?
    • Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy
  • The schools we go to are reflections of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free. Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the position the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika's schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.
  • Education is necessary, I know. But education without values is like a flower without fragrance. No matter how expensive or beautiful the vase, without the flower, it has no meaning. Similarly, education without values can make one literate but can’t make one strong and complete.
  • Even if you’re planning to get me married, that will also cost money! Just help me start my studies; I won’t be a burden on you.
  • If you teach a man anything he will never learn it.
  • Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. ... The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit. An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country.
  • Different views of the same truths are seldom disagreeable to men of taste, and are equally useful to beginners with the writings of different authors upon the same subject.
  • A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.
  • The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically. In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual, must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race. In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution... and must therefore agree with each other. Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords. To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.
  • Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be stuck down.
    • Joseph Stalin, “Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 5
  • If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization in little.
  • It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race. ... As the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child's mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route. Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilization will help to guide us.
  • It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.
  • Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty. … It is at the same time a training in boldness. … It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or least popular opinions.
    • Leo Strauss, “What is liberal education,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 8
  • Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
    • Leo Strauss, “What is liberal education,” Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 8
  • How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart.
    • Louis Sullivan, in "Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual : A Study in Subjective and Objective", an address to the American Institute of Architects (October 1894)
  • What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action?
  • Children arrived at the age of maturity belong, not to the parents, but to the State, to society, to the country.
    • John Swett, History of the Public School System of California, San Francisco: CA, Bancroft (1876) p. 115

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I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics anyway.
At first I hated school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got the next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be. ~ Mark Twain
  • Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability [vs.] probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric.
    • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (2001) Six: Skewness and Symmetry | The Median is Not the Message
  • I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics anyway.
    At first I hated school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got the next day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the easier it got to be.
  • Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

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  • I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.
    • Sigrid Undset, 1928 Nobel Prize in literature; quoted in Twentieth Century Authors, Kunitz and Haycraft, editors (1942), page 1432.

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  • From the inherent ambivalence of education, namely, its capacity to bring out what is least determined in man as well as to program and determine him, Paulo Freire derives what I think is his fundamental thesis: that there is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom. Although it is customarily conceived as a conditioning process, education can equally be an instrument for de-conditioning. An initial choice is required of the educator.
    • João da Veiga Coutinho, Preface to Cultural Action for Freedom (1972)
  • Schools were the other great force of national integration. In theory, every country in Europe had some system of universal education by 1914 and, in a very few cases, this system could provide a means of spectacular social mobility. A clever boy with a supportive parent (usually a mother), a good teacher and an enormous amount of luck might escape his social class altogether. The Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, born in 1891, grew up in poverty as the son of a disgraced former clerk in Sardinia before winning a scholarship to the University of Turin. Such cases were rare, though, and often inflicted terrible costs on those involved (Gramsci was later to speak of a “Taylorism of the mind”). More common was a social mobility that was spread over more than one generation so that the son of a peasant might become a primary schoolteacher and the son of a teacher might acquire a university education.

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The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good. ~ Richard Weaver
We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. ~ Oscar Wilde
The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. ~ Oscar Wilde
  • Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
    • John B. Watson. Behaviorism (Revised edition). (1930). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.82.
  • If you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.
  • The prevailing conception is that education must be such as will enable one to acquire enough wealth to live on the plane of the bourgeoisie. That kind of education does not develop the aristocratic virtues. It neither encourages reflection nor inspires reverence for the good.
  • There is no difficulty in securing enough agreement for action on the point that education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being … then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority.
  • Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. … The very thought seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others.
    • Richard Weaver, “Education and the individual,” Life Without Prejudice (Chicago: 1965), p. 43
  • The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
  • In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
    In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful - Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst].
    • Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education,” Presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England, 1916
  • Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
    • Albert Edward Wiggam, as quoted in Philippine Almanac (1986), p. 344
  • We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
    • Oscar Wilde, Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, pt. 2, Intentions (1891)
  • The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
    • Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ch. 1, Complete Works (New York: 1989), p. 25
  • The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
    • Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry to Dorian, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ch. 2, pp. 28-29
  • Dorian ... never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night,
    • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ch. 11, p. 106
  • The syndicalists fight against the educational system sanctioned by State or Church, the only purpose of which is ultimately to reduce the minds of the young to stencils and to mold them into certain forms so that later, they can more willingly serve the system of political oppression and economic exploitation of the broad masses by a small privileged minority. We believe that the organized working class must provide the school for their own children on their own initiative, and we support any attempt aimed at wresting the monopoly of education from the State and the Church. Only in this way will it be possible to set up a truly free education for life, which not only opens up the collective treasures of human knowledge and provides them to the children, but also at the same time stirs them to their own meditations, promoting their independence and the development of their character in all directions.
  • When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.
  • The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.
  • Education is not a function of any church — or even of a city — or a state; it is a function of all mankind.

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Education is one of the blessings of life — and one of its necessities. ~ Malala Yousafzai
Jan Steen school class with a sleeping schoolmaster, 1672
  • It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man. Any existing distinction between the wise and the stupid, between the rich and the poor, comes down to a matter of education.
  • Therefore, to teach them [women] at least an outline of economics and law is the first requirement after giving them a general education. Figuratively speaking, it will be like providing the women of civilized society with a pocket dagger for self-protection.
    • Fukuzawa Yukichi From Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women (1988), trans. Kiyooka Eiichi.

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

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  • Education is the cheap defence of nations.
    • Attributed to Edmund Burke. Charles Noël Douglas, comp., Forty Thousand Quotations (1921), p. 573. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.
    • Benjamin Disraeli, speech, House of Commons (June 15, 1874). Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 3d series, vol. 219, col. 1618 (1874).
  • An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get.
    • Attributed to William Feather, reported in August Kerber, Quotable Quotes on Education, p. 17 (1968). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People's State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the destinies of the world.
    • Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. James Murphy, p. 357 (1939).
  • The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.
    • Attributed to Sam Houston by the University of Texas. This quotation appears on the verso of the title-page of all University of Texas publications. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
    • Thomas Jefferson, letter to P. S. du Pont de Nemours (April 24, 1816); reported in Henry Augustine Washington, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, And Other Writings, Official and Private, Volume 5 (1854), p. 592. This sentence is one of many quotations inscribed on Cox Corridor II, a first floor House corridor, U.S. Capitol.
  • I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
    • Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 10 (1899), p. 161.
  • If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
    • Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford, vol. 10 (1899), p. 4.
  • I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvil—or a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammer—whether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education.
    • John F. Kennedy, commencement address, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, June 8, 1958. Transcript, p. 2. The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 9th ed., p. 84, no. 8 (1964) gives the quotation from Goethe as follows: "Thou must (in commanding and winning, or serving and losing, suffering or triumphing) be either anvil or hammer," citing his play, Der Gross-Cophta, act II, though it has not been found there.
  • If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for ten years, plant a tree. If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.
    • Kuan Chung, Kuan-tzu (Book of Master Kuan). Kuan tzu chi p'ing, ed. Ling Juheng, vol. 1, p. 12 (1970). Title romanized.
  • Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
    • James Madison, letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822. The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 9, p. 105 (1910). These words are inscribed in the Madison Memorial Hall, Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building.
  • What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty & Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support?
    • James Madison, letter to W. T. Barry, August 4, 1822. The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 9, p. 108 (1910). These words are inscribed to the right of the main entrance of the Library of Congress James Madison Memorial Building.
  • Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men,—the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
    • Horace Mann, twelfth annual report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, 1848. Life and Works of Horace Mann, ed. Mrs. Mary Mann, vol. 3, p. 669 (1868).
  • To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
    • Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. August Kerber, Quotable Quotes of Education, p. 138 (1968). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
  • Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature—this is alike the aim of parent and teacher.
  • These ceremonies and the National Statuary Hall will teach the youth of the land in succeeding generations as they come and go that the chief end of human effort in a sublunary view should be usefulness to mankind, and that all true fame which should be perpetuated by public pictures, statues, and monuments, is to be acquired only by noble deeds and high achievements and the establishment of a character founded upon the principles of truth, uprightness, and inflexible integrity.
    • Alexander H. Stephens, remarks in the House, February 15, 1881, upon Vermont's presentation of a statue of Jacob Collamer to Statuary Hall. Congressional Record, vol. 11, p. 1611.
  • "Via ovicipitum dura est," or, for the benefit of the engineers among you: "The way of the egghead is hard."
    • Adlai Stevenson, lecture at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 17, 1954. Stevenson, Call to Greatness, p. xi (1954).
  • In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
  • In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.
    • Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education—a Plea for Reform," The Organisation of Thought, chapter 1, p. 28 (1917, reprinted 1974).

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

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Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), pp. 216–18.
  • Brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel.
    • Acts, XXII. 3.
  • Culture is "To know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
  • Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
  • Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within the hearsay of little children tends towards the formation of character.
  • But to go to school in a summer morn,
    Oh, it drives all joy away!
    Under a cruel eye outworn,
    The little ones spend the day—
    In sighing and dismay.
  • Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
    • Attributed to Lord Brougham.
  • Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage,—a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier, in full military array.
    • Lord Brougham, Speech. Jan. 29, 1828. Phrase "Look out, gentlemen, the schoolmaster is abroad" first used by Brougham, in 1825, at London Mechanics' Institution, referring to the secretary, John Reynolds, a schoolmaster.
  • Every schoolboy hath that famous testament of Grunnius Corocotta Porcellus at his fingers' ends.
    • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III, Section I. Mem. I. 1.
  • "Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied, "and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."
  • To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.
  • Quod enim munus reipublicæ afferre majus, meliusve possumus, quam si docemus atque erudimus juventutem?
    • What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?
    • Cicero, De Divinatione, II. 2.
  • How much a dunce that has been sent to roam
    Excels a dunce that has been kept at home.
  • The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
  • The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.
  • By education most have been misled.
  • My definition of a University is Mark Hopkins at one end of a log and a student on the other.
    • Tradition well established that James A. Garfield used the phrase at a New York Alumni Dinner in 1872. No such words are found, however. A letter of his, Jan., 1872, contains the same line of thought.
  • Impartially their talents scan,
    Just education forms the man.
    • John Gay, The Owl, Swan, Cock, Spider, Ass, and the Farmer. To a Mother, line 9.
  • Of course everybody likes and respects self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to be made at all.
  • The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us.
    • Mrs. Jameson, Education, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles.
  • Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
    • Horace Mann, Lectures and Reports on Education, Lecture 1.
  • Enflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men, and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.
  • Der preussiche Schulmeister hat die Schlacht bei Sadowa gewonnen.
    • The Prussian schoolmaster won the battle of Sadowa.
    • Von Moltke, in the Reichstag (Feb. 16, 1874).
  • Tempore ruricolæ patiens fit taurus aratri.
    • In time the bull is brought to wear the yoke.
    • Ovid, Tristia, 4. 6. 1. Translation by Thomas Watson. Hecatompathia. No. 47.
  • The victory of the Prussians over the Austrians was a victory of the Prussian over the Austrian schoolmaster.
    • Privy Councillor Peschel, in Ausland, No. 19. July 17, 1866.
  • Education is the only interest worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man.
  • Lambendo paulatim figurant.
    • Licking a cub into shape (free rendering).
    • Pliny the Elder, Natural History, VIII. 36.
  • So watchful Bruin forms with plastic care,
    Each growing lump and brings it to a bear.
  • Then take him to develop, if you can
    And hew the block off, and get out the man.
    • Alexander Pope, Dunciad, IV. 269. A notion of Aristotle's that there was originally in every block of marble, a statue, which would appear on the removal of the superfluous parts.
  • 'Tis education forms the common mind;
    Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.
  • Twelve years ago I made a mock
    Of filthy trades and traffics;
    I considered what they meant by stock;
    I wrote delightful sapphics;
    I knew the streets of Rome and Troy,
    I supped with Fates and Fairies—
    Twelve years ago I was a boy,
    A happy boy at Drury's.
  • He can write and read and cast accompt.
    O monstrous!
    We took him setting of boys' copies.
    Here's a villain!
  • God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune, but to write and read comes by nature.
  • Only the refined and delicate pleasures that spring from research and education can build up barriers between different ranks.
  • Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose,
    To tell what every schoolboy knows.
  • Every school-boy knows it.
    • Jeremy Taylor, On the Real Presence, Section V, 1. Phrase attributed to Macaulay from his frequent use of it.
  • Of an old tale which every schoolboy knows.
  • Still sits the school-house by the road,
    A ragged beggar sunning;
    Around it still the sumachs grow
    And blackberry vines are running.

See also

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  • Encyclopedic article on Education on Wikipedia
  • Media related to Education on Wikimedia Commons
  • The dictionary definition of education on Wiktionary
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