Quotations about education.

Sourced

General

• 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.
  • Ghulam Hazrat Tanha, Director of Education, Herat, Afghanistan
  • Baker, Aryn, "Afghanistan's Girl Gap", Time, 21 January 2008. URL accessed on 2008-01-22.

• Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten.
  • James Bryant Conant, diary as a Harvard freshman (1910-11)

• Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
  • John Dewey (Source: My Pedagogic Creed)

• Education is an ornament for the prosperous, a refuge for the unfortunate.
  • Democritus (ca. 4^th century BC). Tr. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1948

• 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.
  • Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order

• If you think that education is expensive, try ignorance.
  • Derek Bok

• Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.
  • John F. Kennedy, speech on 18th May 1963 on the 90th Anniversary Convocation of Vanderbilt University [1]

• 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.
  • Itzhak Perlman, "Teaching the Teachers" in Strad

• The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
  • Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures

• Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.
  • George H. W. Bush - Announcement of the America 2000 Education Strategy (April 18, 1991) What Work Requires of Schools Pg 2.

• 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.

• School is punishment for the crime of being young.
  • Nana Lee

• True education means fostering the ability to be interested in something.
  • Sumio Iijima, About myself, To the younger generation, in Innovative Engine, column for NEC researchers, Sep.25, 2007 (4th edition)

• "To get the eduaction is our right, to spread the education is our duty"

Teachers

• "If you are truly serious about preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract - teach him to deduct."
  • Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies (1981)
• "In a democratic state the schoolmaster is afraid of his pupils and flatters them, and the pupils despise both schoolmaster and paidagogos. The young expect the same treatment as the old, and contradict them and quarrel with them. In fact, seniors have to flatter their juniors, in order not to be thought morose old dotards."
  • Plato, Republic - 563 BC

• This fallacy [appeal to authority] is not in itself an error; it is impossible to learn much in today's world without letting somebody else crunch the numbers and offer us explanations. And teachers are sources of necessary information. But how we choose our "authorities" and place a value on such information, is just another skill rarely taught in our education systems. It's little wonder that to most folk, sound bites and talking heads are enough to count as experts. […] Teaching is reinforcing the appeal to authority, where anybody who seems more intelligent than you must ultimately be right. […] We educators must simply role-model critical thinking. […] Educators themselves have to be prepared to show that “evidence” and “answers” are two separate things by firmly believing that, themselves.
  • Mike McRae, Australian teacher and guest columnist, "Educating Future Critical Thinkers", Swift, 31 March 2006
• "To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action."
  • Louis Sullivan, architect, mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, "Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings"
• "The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers. We say this, not because we think opinions unimportant, but because of the immense importance which we attach to them; for in proportion to the degree of intellectual power and love of truth which we succeed in creating, is the certainty that (whatever may happen in any one particular instance) in the aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result; and intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoner is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them.
  • John Stuart Mill "Civilization," London and Westminster Review (April 1836)

• Ethics could teach us only those purposes and ideals. If the teachers seeks insight into the means by which the aim can be reached, into the facts by which the child can be molded, his way must lead from ethics to psychology. (...) Water flows downhill, anyhow, but to bring the water uphill hydraulic forces are indeed necessary. To overcome nature and instead to prepare for a life of ideals, to inhibit personal desires and instead to learn to serve the higher purposes indeed demands most serious and most systematic efforts. It is the teachers' task to make these efforts with all his best knowledge of mind and body, of social and of cultural values.
  • Hugo Munsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909 (new edition, 2006), p64-65

• Daily contact with some teachers is itself all-sided ethical education for the child without a spoken precept. Here, too, the real advantage of male over female teachers,especially for boys, is seen in their superior physical strength,which often, if highly estimated, gives real dignity and commands real respect, and especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity of their moods and their discipline.
  • Stanley Hall - Youth: it's education, regimen and hygiene (available at gutenberg.org)

• The schoolmaster is the person who builds up the intelligence of the pupil; the intelligence of the pupil increases in direct proportion to the efforts of the teacher; in other words, he knows just what the master has made him know and understands neither more nor less than the master has made him understand. When an inspector visits a school and questions the pupils he turns to the master, and if he is satisfied says: "Well done, teacher!" For the result is indubitably the work of the master; the discipline by which he has fixed the attention of his pupils, even to the psychical mechanism which has guided him in his teaching, all is due to him. God enters the school as a symbol in the crucifix, but the creator is the teacher.
  • Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education (available at gutenberg.org)

• "To make oneself interesting artificially," that is, interesting to those who have no interest in us, is indeed a very difficult task; and to arrest the attention hour after hour, and year after year, not of one, but of a multitude of persons who have nothing in common with us, not even years, is indeed a superhuman undertaking. Yet this is the task of the teacher, or, as he would say, his "art": to make this assembly of children whom he has reduced to immobility by discipline follow him with their minds, understand what he says, and learn; an internal action, which he cannot govern, as he governs the position of their bodies, but which he must win by making himself interesting, and by maintaining this interest.
  • Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education (available at gutenberg.org)

• "The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called 'truth.'"
  • Dan Rather, (available at http://www.quotegarden.com/teachers.html)

• Here's a lesson for all teachers: You may know what you're saying, but you never know what you're teaching.
  • Frank van Dun, note on website

• "English Teachers. They're there for their students."
  • Gregory Alan Elliott, Twitter posting by greg_a_ellliott, August 19, 2009, 9:25 EST

• For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. [...] There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis.
  • Bill Moyers, "America 101", speech at the fiftieth anniversary of the Council of Great City Schools, 27 October 2006, Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 237

Self-education and home education

• 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.
  • Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures

• 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 Antoninus, Meditations, Book I, verse 4

• Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
  • Leonardo da Vinci

• The most complete gift of God is a life based on knowledge.
  • Ali ibn Abi Talib, Nahjul Balagha

Raising children

• Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
  • The Bible, Proverbs, 22:6

• Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely , if ever, do they forgive them.
  • Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

• Children are given to us to discourage our better emotions.
  • Saki, Reginald

• Whatever you would have your children become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversation."
  • Lydia H. Sigourney

• The parents who are unwilling to permit their children to undergo a course of training under strict discipline, are the ones who deserve the reproof. In the first place, everything they possess, including the children, is devoted to ambition.
  • Petronius "The Satyricon; Vol I, Chap.IV"

• It has been written that Boris "laid down a course of study for him in infancy." Nothing could be sillier. We tried to cultivate his curiosity on all subjects, and when he asked to answer fully, and to lead him to a greater curiosity so that he would go and find out for himself. But we never tried to push him an inch along any mental path in which he was not interested.
  • Sarah Sidis, mother of William James Sidis

• It (obedience) is the sole duty of the children; it develops sooner than other moral feelings, for it is the root of all morality. Later on, [even] after morality becomes possible within the sphere that has been left free by the parents, obedience still remains the highest duty. The child is not permitted to want to be free outside this sphere.
  • Johann Gottlieb Fichte - The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, 2005, Cambridge, p.320

• Exercises in being obedient can not begin too early, and I have, during an olmost daily observation of six years, discovered no harm from an early, consistent, guiding of the germinating will, provided only this guiding be done with the greatest mildness and justice, as if the infant had already an insight into the benefits of obedience.
  • William Thierry Preyer, The Mind of the Child,1890, p.345 (Preyer was the first child psychologist)

• The old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from moral and religious training, where it still persists in full force. (...) But parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble,and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship of external authority.
  • Stanley Hall - Youth: it's education, regimen and hygiene (available at gutenberg.org)

Goal of education

• This education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.
  • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays, 1735

• Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.
  • John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914

• 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.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, essay 'Emerson on education'

• Not for life, but for school do we learn.
  • Seneca the Younger, Epistles (106, line 12)

Coercion and education

• 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 src

• (...) 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)

Philosophy of education

• The real nature of education is at variance with the account given of it by certain of its professors.
  • Socrates, from Plato's The Republic

• The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
  • William James, Principles of Psychology

• "Good teaching comes from good people."
  • Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

• We must become just by doing just acts.
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, #4

• It is by doing good that we become good.
  • Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile

• Man must develop his tendency towards the good.
  • Immanuel Kant, Thoughts on Education, #12

• In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort.
  • Plato, "The Allegory of the Cave"

• From now on, I'm not doing anything I don't want to do. The world owes me happiness, fulfillment, and success. I'm just here to cash in.
  • Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes, "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat"

• It is no easy task to be good.
  • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, #9

• The most important thing is that the natural will of the child be broken.
  • August Hermann Francke, (German educator)Pädagogische Schriften, p15

History of education

• It must also be remembered that one of the three branches of Primary Education in Hellas would be called play in England: an afternoon spent in running races, jumping, wrestling, or riding would not be regarded as work by an English schoolboy. Music, too, is usually learned during play-hours in an English school. Even Letters, when the elementary stage was past, meant reciting, reading, or learning by heart the literature of the boy's own language, and most of it not stiff literature by any means, but such fascinating fairy-tales as are found in Homer. There is little trace of Hellenic boys creeping unwillingly to school: their lessons were made eminently attractive.
  • Kenneth Freeman - 'The Schools of Hellas' p81.

• (...) but the story that Rome created and maintained an extensive system of state-controlled and -supported schools is mainly hyperbole. (...) Official policy had the effect of encouraging the opening of schools, but throughout the greater part of Rome's history, neither compulsory education nor a state school system was enforced or erected.
  • Edward J. Power, A Legacy of Learning: A History of Western Education, 1991, p92

Sex education

• I look forward to the day when those adults who preach an anti-sex philosophy to teenagers become as unpopular as the teens who embrace it.
  • Jacob Appel, Embracing Teenage Sexuality: Let's Rethink the Age of Consent, Jan 1, 2010.

Against education

Against the educational system

• Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.
  • Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism, p. 114

• I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
  • Petronius, Satyricon

• 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

• Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore.
  • Robert Morley, Robert Morley: Responsible Gentleman (1966)

• 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

• 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

• Children are naturally expressive but they go to school and get it taught out of them.
  • Robert Duke, "Teaching the Teachers" in Strad

• In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Eduation 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

• The child is regarded as a sort of a little beast, a kind of young ape, at best a little savage. The child, accordingly, is trained to act not by the light of reason, but by the command of superior force. The child is ruled by fear. Our young generation is trained by fear into discipline and obedience. We thus suppress the natural genius and originality of the child, we favor and raise mediocrity, and cultivate the philistine, the product of education, ruled by rod, not by thought.
  • Boris Sidis, Lecture on the abuse of the fear instinct in early education

• "At school boys become gluttons and slovens, and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, very early rush into libertinism which destroys the constitution before it is formed; hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding."
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects" (1792)

• Gosh, its alot like school here isnt it?
  • Anonymous On being in jail

• "Regarding testing, students are like flowers. If we keep measuring them, will grow?"
  • Anonymous

• "I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old."
  • Stanley Kubrick

Against state education

• There is not, perhaps, in the kingdom, a more dogmatical, or luxurious set of men, than the pedantic tyrants who reside in colleges and preside at public schools.
  • Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects" (1792)

• A government system of education in Prussia is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society, for there all wisdom is supposed to be lodged in the government. But the thing is wholly inadmissible here . . . because, according to our theory, the people are supposed to be wiser than the government. Here, the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give the law to the government. To entrust, then, the government with the power of determining the education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power to be our master. This fundamental difference between the two countries, we apprehend, has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters.
  • Orestes Brownson, Testimony against proposed Truancy Laws before the Massachusetts Board of Education, 19th Century

• [w]e cannot violate the principles of liberty in regard to education without furnishing at once a precedent and inducement toviolate them in regard to other matters.
  • Sir Edward Baines

• Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
  • Thurgood Marshall, Stanley v. Georgia, Delivering the opinion of the US. Supreme Court, 1969

• There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.
  • Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism, p. 115

• I would promise the whole amount were I not afraid that someday my gift might be abused for someone's selfish purposes, as I see happen in many places where teachers' salaries are paid from public funds. There is only one remedy to meet this evil: if the appointment of teachers is left entirely to the parents, and they are conscientious about making a wise choice through their obligation to contribute to the cost.
  • Pliny the Younger, Letters and Panegyricus, Book IV, XIII; London, 1969, William Heinemann, p. 277-283
  • writing to his friend Tacitus almost two thousand years ago, describing his plan to establish a secondary school in his home town, but adding that he had decided to pay only one third of the total cost

• The school that flies the flag is, in the long run accountable to that flag and to the power and values which is represents.
  • Jonathan Kozol, as quoted by Robin Small, in "Marx and education".

• 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. An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exists at all, as one among many competing
  • John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, ed. Edwin A. Burtt (New York: Random House, 1939), pp. 1033–34

• Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents. The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
  • John Taylor Gatto, I Quit, I Think, 2001

• Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is compulsory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned and punished for trying to escape - in short, in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?
  • Royce Van Norman, "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47 (1966):315-16

• Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1874)

• That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. 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 and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
  • H.L. Mencken

• ...this has become the most notable feature of the recent history of European 'education': the enterprise of substituting 'socialization' for education. ... The design here is to reduce or abolish disparities in opportunity and thus to generate a 'fully integrated' society. Here, however, the design and its imposition upon the educational engagement are inseperable: the design itself requires that all schools shall be the same and that none shall be 'School'.

Michael Oakeshott, Education: the engagement and its frustration

• Education: free and compulsory - what a way to learn logic!

Frank van Dun, note on website

For education

For state education

• Of all our institutions public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent upon the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment. Above all we must secure unity: we must be able to cast a whole generation in the same mould.
  • Napoleon Bonaparte, in an 1807 meeting of the Council of State. Quoted in "The Life and Memoirs of Count Molé", written by Mathieu Louis Molé, edited by the Marquis de Noailles. 2v London, 1923, 61.

• "Therefore I praise New England because it is the country in the world where is the freest expenditure for education. ..., namely, that the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will: not alone in the elements, but, by further provision, in the languages, in sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The child shall be taken up by the State, and taught, at the public cost, the rudiments of knowledge, and, at last, the ripest results of art and science.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, essay - 'Emerson on education'

• (...) success itself will decide whether the end of education, the [child's] usefullness [for the end of reason], has been attained. This is a manner of which the state is an extremely competent judge. Thus, if the state grants some office to the son, it thereby judges that his education is completed. Moreover, the judgement of the state binds the parents juridically; they ought to subordinate themselves to it for the sake of duty.
  • Johann Gottlieb Fichte - The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, 2005, Cambridge, p.323

• When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."
  • Adolf Hitler, on Public Education, speech in November 1933

• There is a doctrine that is fundamental in American education. That is: every child born or adopted by this republic has by virtue of that fact the right to have developed whatever of talent he may possess, without reference to the quality, quantity, or type of that talent, under conditions favorable to such development, and that he shall have assured to him the oppurtunity to go as far as his ability and ambition will permit in order that he may live his life more abundantly than he otherwise could.
  • Claude L. Kulp, Ithaca High School Dedication Address, September 1960 (reprinted in The Ithaca Journal, September 26, 1960)

• Dear rulers ... I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. ... If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.
  • Martin Luther, 1524, letter to the German rulers
  • quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896

• In particular, at this point also urge governing authorities and parents to rule well and to send their children to school. Point out how they are obliged to do so and what a damnable sin they commit if they do not, for thereby, as the worst enemies of God and humanity, they overthrow and lay waste both the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. Explain very clearly what kind of horrible damage they do when they do not help to train children as pastors, preachers, civil servants, etc., and tell them that God will punish them dreadfully for this. For in our day and age it is necessary to preach about these things. The extent to which parents and governing authorities are now sinning in these matters defies description. The devil, too, intends to do something horrible in all this.
  • Martin Luther, forword to 'the small catechismus'
  • Preface.19-20, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2000

• ...whoever has a right to hang has a right to educate.
  • Lord Macaulay, Education, April 19, 1847

• Lycurgus," says Plutarch, "resolved the whole business of legislation into the bringing up of youth." When our legislators shall have learnt wisdom from the Spartan, they will acquire, as he acquired, the power of remoulding the national character.
  • Robert Owen, Tracts on Republican Government and National Education (1840), p.14

• there shall be compulsory education, as the saying is, of all and sundry, as far this is possible; and the pupils shall be regarded as belonging to the state rather than to their parents.
  • Plato, The Laws

• I think this (...) will demand, as a minimum condition, the establishment of a world State and the subsequent institution of a world-wide system of education designed to produce loyalty to the world State. No doubt such a system of education will entail, at any rate for a century or two, certain crudities which will militate agains the development of the individual. But if the alternative is chaos and the death of civilisation, the price will be worth paying.
  • Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order

• Education, Public – "The single most important element in the maintenance of a democratic system."... "The better the citizenry as a whole are educated, the wider and more sensible public participation, debate and social mobility will be. Any serious rivalry from private education systems will siphon off Élites and thus fatally weaken both the drive and the financing of the state system. That a private system may be able to offer to a limited number of students the finest education in the world is irrelevant. Highly sophisticated Élites are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace."
  • John Ralston Saul, Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Penguin, 1995

• Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic revolutionary changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. That is my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
  • Aaron Sorkin, The West Wing

• Education Public - "It is established that education is absolutely vital for an advancing society, the point I am arguing is that state education creates a level playing field for all students regardless of colour, creed and class.
  • Julien V. Tempone, youth of the year award winner; for this exert on his speech on equality, 2006

For Choice in Education

"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."

• • Immanuel Kant, in his university lectures "On Pedagogy"

Future of education

• 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)

Unsourced

General

^{[citation needed]}

• Learning is like a jigsaw puzzle. When you first lay the pieces out, it doesn't make much sense. When you start to connect the pieces, you then begin to see how it all fits together.
  • Anonymous

• Education is the journey from cocksure arrogance to thoughtful uncertainty.
  • Kevin Huenison

• Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
  • Chinese proverb

• Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• Education is a treasure.
  • Petronius

• Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
  • Oscar Wilde

• The better the citizenry as a whole are educated, the wider and more sensible public participation, debate and social mobility will be...Highly sophisticated Élites are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace.
  • John Ralston Saul

• To be well-informed is to have the world at your fingers.
  • Joseph Jones

• College is about three things: homework fun and sleep ... but you can only choose two.
  • Andy Stern

• The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
  • Robert E. Lee

• "The secret of education is respecting the pupil."
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The difference between a man and an animal is that a man is educated and animals are not.
  • Muhammd Farhad

• Knowledge is a wild thing, it must be hunted before being tamed.
  • Anonymous

Self-education and home education

^{[citation needed]}

• "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
  • Epictetus

• I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
  • Mark Twain

• "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
  • Mark Twain

• Read, read, read. Do, do, do.
  • Louis L'Amour

• The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
  • Robert E. Lee

• All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
  • Sir Walter Scott

Raising children

^{[citation needed]}

• Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.
  • John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704)

• It takes a whole village to raise a child.
  • Ashanti proverb

• "To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
  • Theodore Roosevelt, American adventurer and U.S. president (1858-1919)

• You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
  • Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-American novelist and poet (1883-1931)

• The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• Let any one examine the pedagogic literature of the present; he who is not shocked at its utter poverty of spirit and its ridiculously awkward antics is beyond being spoiled. Here our philosophy must not begin with wonder but with dread; he who feels no dread at this point must be asked not to meddle with pedagogic questions.

• • Friedrich Nietzsche,Lecture on education - February 6th 1872

• A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
  • George Santayana

Goal of education

^{[citation needed]}

• [Schools are] "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.
  • Elwood Cubberly, Stanford's Dean of Education

• Every teacher should realize... that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the secring of the right social growth.
  • John Dewey

• We shall not make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from amonth them authors, educatiors, poets or men of letters... The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things [obediance] their fathers and mothers are doing in a imperfect way.
  • Rockefeller Education Board, as Quoted by John Taylor Gato

• Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man.
  • Swami Vivekananda

• "Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of real education."
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.

• But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy: that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly.
  • Plato, Greek philosopher (c. 428–c. 348)

• Educate the heart. Let us have good men.
  • Hiram Powers, American sculptor (1805-1873)

• I have hope that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be reformed.
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz

• Education would be much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every student should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
  • William Haley

• If we are to reach real peace in this world ... we shall have to begin with the children.
  • Mohandas Gandhi, Indian nonviolent civil rights leader (1869-1948)

• No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
  • Emma Goldman, Lithuanian-American anarchist writer, lecturer and activist (1869-1940)

• The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
  • Robert Hutchins

• Life doesn't revolve around what you need to know, it revolves around what you need to understand.
  • Ganesh Nana, New Zealand Economist.

• Education is a method by which one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
  • Laurence J. Peter

Role models

^{[citation needed]}

• Children need models rather than critics.
  • Joseph Joubert, French essayist (1752-1824)

• "A poor teacher complains, an average teacher explains, a good teacher teaches, a great teacher inspires."
  • H. Narasimhaiah
• The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public's expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.
  • C. Wright Mills,w:The Power Elite,1956.

• "Don't worry that children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you."
  • Robert Fulghum, American author (b. 1937)

• I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates a climate. My daily mood makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be the tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor. Hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.
  • Haim Ginott

• The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children.
  • Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.)

• "The question for the child is not 'Do I want to be good?' but 'Whom do I want to be like?'"
  • Bruno Bettelheim, Austrian-American child psychologist, author (1903-1990)

• Example has more followers than reason.
  • Christian Nevell Bovee, American author and lawyer (1820-1904)

• The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
  • John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury

• Music education begins nine months before the birth of the mother.
  • Zoltán Kodály, Hungarian composer (1882-1967)

• It is the kindness and not the harshness in the headmaster’s voice that pushes tough boys to cry.
  • Yiddish proverb

Against education

Against the conventional educational system (school)

^{[citation needed]}

• Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
  • Henry Brooks Adams

• School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, so why practice?
  • Billie Joe Armstrong

• "I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
  • Agatha Christie

• Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
  • Cicero

• Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
  • Calvin Coolidge

• Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent
  • Ellwood P. Cubberley, Conceptions of Education (1909)

• There is no human reason why a child should not admire and emulate his teacher's ability to do sums, rather than the village bum's ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes. The reason why the child does not is plain enough - the bum has put himself on an equality with him and the teacher has not.
  • Floyd Dell

• Whatever the explanation, it's perfectly obvious that our educational system has nothing to do with education: it's a babysitting service designed to replicate the worst qualities of the parents.
  • Stephen R. Donaldson, author

• How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
  • Alexandre Dumas

• Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.
  • Irwin Edman

• We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
  • Erich Fromm

• The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
  • Robert Frost

• When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling
  • John Taylor Gatto

• I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
  • John W. Gardner

• There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
  • William Glasser

• Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life."
  • Goethe

• Instead of studying for finals, what about just going to the Bahamas and catching some rays? Maybe you'll flunk, but you might have flunked anyway; that's my point.
  • Jack Handey

• No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
  • John Holt

• Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
  • Victor Hugo

• Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.
  • Robert M. Hutchins

• [Schools:] vast factories for the manufacture of robots.
  • Robert Lindner (1914-1956)

• School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.
  • H.L. Mencken

• 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

• Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
  • Malcolm Muggeridge; quoted in The Observer (1966)

• There is a lot to be learned from school, if you can learn to read between the lines.
  • Swami Raj

• I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
  • Carl Rogers

• My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
  • George Bernard Shaw

• Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
  • Lillian Smith

• Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
  • Gertrude Stein, American writer (1874-1946)

• Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality—and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.
  • Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children" (1862)

• Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
  • G. M. Trevelyan

• 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

• 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

• when a snowflake falls from the sky it is individual and unique but the moment it is brought into a class room everyone turns into the same drop of water.
  • Bill Watterson

• As you can see, I have memorized this utterly useless piece of information long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You've taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations.
  • Bill Watterson

Against state education

^{[citation needed]}

• America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
  • Evan Esar, American humorist, 1899-1995

• Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.
  • Frank Zappa

• The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately... education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence. in Grosvenor Square.
  • Oscar Wilde

• To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called school, equipped with tortures called education.
  • John Updike

• Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
  • Baruch Spinoza

• Years of centralized education have produced nothing but failure and frustrated parents. We can resurrect our public school system if we follow the Constitution and end the federal education monopoly.
  • Ron Paul

• Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.
  • Thomas Hodgskin, 1823

For education

For state education

^{[citation needed]}

• Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
  • Joseph Stalin
• Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
  • Henry Peter Brougham, Scottish Whig politician (Speech, January 29, 1828, to the House of Commons)

• I just love the idea of a school in which people come to get educated and stay in the state in which they're educated.
  • George W. Bush, Waco, Texas, August 13, 2002

• The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of the fantastic opportunistic society.
  • George W. Bush, Santa Clara, California, May 1, 2002

• Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin ... the great equalizer of the conditions of men - the balance-wheel of the social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.
  • Horace Mann

• I know, (there is) no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of society, but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with 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 in an 1820 letter to William C. Jarvis

• Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.
  • Elwood Cubberly, future Dean of education at Stanford, in his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College.

• Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
  • William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education [2]

• The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. … It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
  • William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education [3]

• We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
  • Woodrow Wilson in a speech to businessmen, and from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909

• It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.
  • Benito Mussolini, from "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932.

• In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
  • John D. Rockefeller General Education Board (1906)

• Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
  • Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education, from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935

• "Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants' of a single family rather than the "needs' of society.
  • Association of California School Administrators

• When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
  • Albert Shanker, Former President of the American Federation of Teachers

• Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
  • John Dewey, 1879.

See also

• Autodidacticism
• Books

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