No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete. ~G.K. Chesterton
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men. ~Bill Beattie
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. ~Sydney J. Harris
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. ~Albert Einstein
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt
It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.
An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life. ~Author Unknown
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. ~Robert G. Ingersoll
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. ~G.M. Trevelyan
To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks. ~A.A. Milne
Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. ~Edward Everett
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. ~Ezra Pound, "The Instructor: II," Chapter Eight, ABC of Reading, 1934
Education should be exercise; it has become massage. ~Martin H. Fischer
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog. ~Mark Twain
My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. ~Will Durant
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? ~Erich Fromm
Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge. Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs. ~Martin H. Fischer
Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. ~William Haley
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education. ~Tallulah Bankhead
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. ~George Santayana
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. ~Malcolm S. Forbes
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious — just dead wrong. ~R. Baker
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. ~Henry David Thoreau
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 True Function and Value of Criticism; With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing: A Dialogue," The Nineteenth Century, July 1890 (Gilbert speaking)
Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use? It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that. All we need to do is start the war on education. If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics. ~Leighann Lord
What if man were required to educate his children without the help of talking animals. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion. ~Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else. ~Cornelius Vanderbilt
Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. ~Aristotle
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. ~G.K. Chesterton
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. ~Robert Frost
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928
The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know. ~William R. Inge
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. ~Aristotle
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education! ~Grant Allen, 1894, commonly attributed with various wordings to Mark Twain (Thanks, Garson O'Toole ofquoteinvestigator.com!)
Education is the movement from darkness to light. ~Allan Bloom
When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ~Peter Drucker
If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous. ~Desmond Bagley
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. ~John W. Gardner
There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in. ~Will Rogers
Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire. ~William Butler Yeats
A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions. ~Martin H. Fischer
A man must serve his time to every trade,
Save censure—critics all are ready made.
Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote
With just enough learning to misquote...
~Lord Byron, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; A Satire," 1809
There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. ~Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, September 1982
The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. ~Lewis Carroll
Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. ~Roger Lewin
They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing. ~Richard Yates
I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated. ~Al McGuire
The tragedy of education is played in two scenes — incompetent pupils facing competent teachers and incompetent teachers facing competent pupils. ~Martin H. Fischer
A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it. ~Brander Matthews
But oh! the Latin!—Madame, you can really have no idea of what a mess it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. Lucky dogs! they already knew in their cradles the nouns ending in im. I on the contrary had to learn it by heart, in the sweat of my brow... ~Heinrich Heine, "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day." ~Peter Brodie
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life. ~Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 1883
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey
Who knows the difference between education and training? For those of you with daughters, would you rather have them take sex education or sex training? Need I say more? ~Dennis Rubin
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. ~Pete Seeger
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. ~John Maynard Keynes
Education is learning what you didn't know you didn't know. ~George Boas
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. ~Michel de Montaigne
Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throats. ~Martin H. Fischer
It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it. ~Finley Peter Dunne
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
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
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. ~George Santayana
The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. ~John Updike, The Centaur, 1963
You can get all A's and still flunk life. ~Walker Percy
The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living. ~Will Rogers
My parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job." ~Thomas L. Friedman
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other. ~George Eliot
Education is the transmission of civilization. ~Ariel and Will Durant
The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions. ~Mandell Creighton
If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty." You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality. ~Ivan Stang, High Weirdness By Mail
Related Quotations: Learning, Teachers, Children, Back to School, Experience, College, Off to College, Curiosity, Wisdom, Knowledge, Math, Science, Teacher Appreciation, Graduation, Business
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men. ~Bill Beattie
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. ~Sydney J. Harris
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school. ~Albert Einstein
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt
It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers. ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.
An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life. ~Author Unknown
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. ~Robert G. Ingersoll
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. ~G.M. Trevelyan
To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks. ~A.A. Milne
Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both. ~Abraham Flexner
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. ~Edward Everett
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who INSIST on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. ~Ezra Pound, "The Instructor: II," Chapter Eight, ABC of Reading, 1934
Education should be exercise; it has become massage. ~Martin H. Fischer
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog. ~Mark Twain
My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. ~Will Durant
Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age? ~Erich Fromm
Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge. Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs. ~Martin H. Fischer
Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. ~William Haley
I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education. ~Tallulah Bankhead
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. ~George Santayana
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious — just dead wrong. ~R. Baker
What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook. ~Henry David Thoreau
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 True Function and Value of Criticism; With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing: A Dialogue," The Nineteenth Century, July 1890 (Gilbert speaking)
Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use? It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that. All we need to do is start the war on education. If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics. ~Leighann Lord
What if man were required to educate his children without the help of talking animals. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion. ~Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else. ~Cornelius Vanderbilt
Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. ~Aristotle
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. ~G.K. Chesterton
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. ~Robert Frost
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928
The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know. ~William R. Inge
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. ~Aristotle
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education! ~Grant Allen, 1894, commonly attributed with various wordings to Mark Twain (Thanks, Garson O'Toole ofquoteinvestigator.com!)
Education is the movement from darkness to light. ~Allan Bloom
When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course. ~Peter Drucker
If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous. ~Desmond Bagley
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. ~John W. Gardner
There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in. ~Will Rogers
Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire. ~William Butler Yeats
A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions. ~Martin H. Fischer
A man must serve his time to every trade,
Save censure—critics all are ready made.
Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote
With just enough learning to misquote...
~Lord Byron, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; A Satire," 1809
There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny. ~Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, September 1982
The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. ~Lewis Carroll
Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. ~Roger Lewin
They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing. ~Richard Yates
I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated. ~Al McGuire
The tragedy of education is played in two scenes — incompetent pupils facing competent teachers and incompetent teachers facing competent pupils. ~Martin H. Fischer
A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it. ~Brander Matthews
But oh! the Latin!—Madame, you can really have no idea of what a mess it is. The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. Lucky dogs! they already knew in their cradles the nouns ending in im. I on the contrary had to learn it by heart, in the sweat of my brow... ~Heinrich Heine, "Ideas: Book Le Grand," 1826, translated from German by Charles Godfrey Leland, Pictures of Travel, 1855
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day." ~Peter Brodie
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life. ~Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 1883
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. ~John Dewey
Who knows the difference between education and training? For those of you with daughters, would you rather have them take sex education or sex training? Need I say more? ~Dennis Rubin
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't. ~Pete Seeger
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. ~John Maynard Keynes
Education is learning what you didn't know you didn't know. ~George Boas
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. ~Michel de Montaigne
Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throats. ~Martin H. Fischer
It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it. ~Finley Peter Dunne
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
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
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. ~George Santayana
The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. ~John Updike, The Centaur, 1963
You can get all A's and still flunk life. ~Walker Percy
The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living. ~Will Rogers
My parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job." ~Thomas L. Friedman
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other. ~George Eliot
Education is the transmission of civilization. ~Ariel and Will Durant
The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions. ~Mandell Creighton
If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty." You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality. ~Ivan Stang, High Weirdness By Mail
Related Quotations: Learning, Teachers, Children, Back to School, Experience, College, Off to College, Curiosity, Wisdom, Knowledge, Math, Science, Teacher Appreciation, Graduation, Business
Quotes on Education
The educational process has been the subject of much comment by academics and writers. Their observations range from praise to cynicism, mostly the latter. Education is an easy target for criticism because its stated aims are often so nobly ambitious that they have little chance of being realized. It should give us pause that so many people who have made their mark in the world of ideas, who have been acknowledged leaders and innovators, have held formal education and educational institutions in low regard. We have collected here a variety of thought-provoking observations on education.
First, some definitions of education.
Education is...
- One of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.
- William Lowe Bryan (1860–1955) 10th president of Indiana University (1902 to 1937).
- Hanging around until you've caught on.
- Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) American poet.
- One of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
- Bertrand A. Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician, and writer.
- Man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.
- Kenneth G. Johnson (1922-2002) American educator, semanticist.
- A form of self-delusion.
- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor and printer.
- [A process] which makes one rogue cleverer than another.
- Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) Irish poet and dramatist.
- The inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by the incompetent.
- Josiah Charles Stamp (1880-1941) British civil servant, industrialist, economist, statistician and banker.
- [Education] consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer.
- Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
- George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (1633-1695) English statesman and author.
- Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.
- Will Durant (1885-1981) U.S. author and historian.
- A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British dramatist, critic, writer.
- Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
- Norman Douglas (1868-1952) British writer.
- Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.
- Prof. Irwin Edman (1896–1954) American philosopher and educator.
ABOUT EDUCATION
From clever definitions we move on to comments about education.- The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.
- Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) American novelist and short story writer.
- Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little he can for his money.
- Max Leon Forman (1909-1990) Jewish-American writer.
- The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
- Henry Brooks Adams (1828-1918) U.S. historian and writer. The Education of Henry Adams.
- Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.
- Henry Fielding (1707-1754) English novelist, dramatist.
- It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.
- Robert Maynard Hutchins (also Maynard Hutchins) (1899–1977) educational philosopher, dean of Yale Law School (1927-1929), a president of the University of Chicago (1929–1945) and its chancellor (1945–1951).
- Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.
- John Mason Brown (1900–1969) American drama critic and author.
- Education … has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
- G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) British historian
- We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) U.S. essayist and poet.
- A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.
- Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) American president
- But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.
- Saki (H. H. Munro) (1870-1916) Scottish author
- I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, 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 (1854–1900) Irish writer, poet and playwright. "The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1."
- Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
- John Ruskin (1819-1900) English critic
- They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. They are not the same thing.
- Douglas Yates
- Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician and writer.
- You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.
- Jerome David Salinger (1919- ) U. S. novelist and short-story writer.
- The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, critic and writer.
- Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Irish poet and dramatist. The Decay of Lying.
- He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British dramatist, critic, writer. Maxims for Revolutionists.
- At some point every faculty would vote to hang their dean in effigy, if only they could agree on a date.
- Source unknown.
- The average Ph.D. Thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
- James Frank Dobie (1888–1964) American folklorist, writer, and newspaper columnist.
- You can lade a man up to th' university, but ye can't make him think.
- Finley Peter Dunne (1867—1936) U.S. author, writer and humorist.
- There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly–but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.
- Samuel Johnson (1709-84) English lexicographer and writer.
- It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…. I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not…
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) U.S. physicist
- I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British dramatist, critic, writer.
- The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.
- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor and printer.
- Teachers are people who start things they never see finished, and for which they never get thanks until it is too late.
- Max Leon Forman (1909-1990) Jewish-American writer.
- Some men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu.
- William Howard Taft (1857-1930) 27th U.S. President (1909- 13)
- Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing–the rest is mere sheep-herding.
- Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972) U.S. poet.
- I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.
- Petronius (d. circa 66 CE) The Satyricon.
- True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius.
- Felix E. Schelling (1858-1945) American educator
- The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.
- Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Swiss cognitive psychologist.
- No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
- G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) British author
- The modern child, when asked what he learned today, replies, "Nothing, but I gained some meaningful insights."
- William E. ("Bill") Vaughan (1915–1977) American columnist and author.
- Consider... the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American editor, critic and writer.
- The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.
- Andre Gide (1869-1951) French writer.
- I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
- Wilson Mizner (1876-1933) American dramatist.
- Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
- Robert G. Ingersoll, Abraham Lincoln.
- The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) U.S. essayist and poet.
- The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.
- John Dewey (1859-1952) U.S. philosopher and educator.
- Courses in education given at...teachers' colleges have traditionally been used as a substitute for genuine scholarship. In my opinion, much of the so-called science of "education" was invented as a necessary mechanism for enabling semieducated people to act as tolerable teachers.
- Sloan Wilson (1920- ) U.S. journalist and novelist.
- Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
- Walter Bagehot (1826-77) English economist, political journalist, and critic.Physics and Politics, 1879.
- Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
- Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) English biologist and writer.
- Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) English novelist, essayist, critic.
- He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American statesman, author, scientist, inventor and philosopher.
- A college degree does not lessen the length of your ears; it only conceals it.
- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor and printer.
- The only thing experience teaches us is that experience teaches us nothing.
- André Maurois (1885-1967) French biographer and writer.
- I'm still waiting for some college to come up with a march protesting student ignorance.
- Paul Larmer (Chicago Tribune)
- A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British dramatist, critic, writer.
- I am inclined to think that one's education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots.
- Hesketh Pearson (1887-1964) British biographer.
- The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.
- George Saville, Marquis of Hallifax (1633-1695) English statesman and essayist.
- In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer.
- Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer.
- I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer.
- In England … education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
- Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) Irish poet and dramatist.
- 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 (1856-1900) Irish poet and dramatist. The Critic as Artist.
- You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian physicist and astronomer.
- Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
- Henry Brooks Adams (1828-1918) U.S. historian and writer. The Education of Henry Adams.
- There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get off the thing that he was educated in.
- Will Rogers (1879-1935) U.S. actor and humorist.
- Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) U.S. journalist and writer.
- Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.
- John Ray (1627?-1705) English naturalist.
- A wise man is one who finally realizes that there are some questions one can ask which may have no answers.
- Anon
- He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins.
- William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) U.S. Unitarian clergyman and writer.
- Education is too important to be left solely to educators.
- Francis Keppel (1916–1990) American educator, U.S. Commissioner of Education (1962–1965).
- Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.
- Edmund S. Wilson (1895-1972) U.S. author, literary and social critic.
- Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
- Helen Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) English author, illustrator, mycologist and conservationist.
- Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
- Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short-story writer and essayist.
- Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
- Robert Lee Frost (1874–1963) American poet.
- Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
- C. C. Colton, Lacon: Reflections, No. 322.
Doesn't Anyone Have Anything Good to Say?
One must search diligently to find laudatory comments on education (other than those pious platitudes which are fodder for commencement speeches). It appears that most persons who have achieved fame and success in the world of ideas are cynical about formal education. These people are a select few, who often achieved success in spite of their education, or even without it. As has been said, the clever largely educate themselves, those less able aren't sufficiently clever or imaginative to benefit much from education. English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) put it this way: "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."But those tempted to take the route of self-education should heed the warning of the old maxim: "He who would educate himself should be a born educator." Benjamin Franklin, who largely educated himself, cautions: "He that teaches himself hath a fool for his master."
For those of us neither geniuses nor hopeless fools, formal education may be a useful thing–if approached in the right spirit, with an eager and open mind and a rationally skeptical attitude. This brief quote collection can be appropriately closed with some positive comments:
- Education: 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 once you get it.
- William A. Feather (1889-1981) American publisher and author.
- An educated man is one who can entertain a new idea, entertain another person and entertain himself.
- Sydney Wood
- Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
- Anon
- The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's time.
- Sydney J. Harris (1917-1986) American journalist.
- Education is not the filling a bucket but the lighting of a fire.
- William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet, dramatist.
- The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action.
- Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, political theorist, and sociological theorist.
- Your Education is worth what You are worth.
- Anon
- When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, "As much as the living are to the dead."
- Diogenes Laertius (fl. 2nd century).
- Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, and inventor. Notebooks.
- To be able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is educated.
- Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American educator and author.
- Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.
- Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian physician, educator, philosopher, humanitarian.
- Educators and architects preserve children's freedom.
- Amelia Gambetti. (Villetta School- Reggio Emilia, Italy)
- Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.
- Wendy Kaminer.
- If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
- Susan Brownell Anthony (1820–1906) American civil rights leader.
- Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
- Marian Wright Edelman (1939-) American activist for the rights of children.
Science Education
- There is a great danger in the present day lest science-teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding.
- J. D. Everett [In the preface to his 1873 English translation of Elementary Treatise on Natural Philosophy by A Privat Deschanel. (D. Appleton and Co.)]
- In education, nothing works if the students don't.
- Donald E. Simanek (1936-) American physicist, educator, humorist.
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