quotations about education
If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstructs its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Spending money on higher education is like spending it on defense. You suspect half of it is wasted, but you cannot tell which half.
SIMON JENKINS
The Guardian, May 31, 2019
The real object of education is to give children resources that will endure as long as life endures.
SYDNEY SMITH
Essays Social and Political
You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
All you have to do to educate a child is leave him alone and teach him to read. The rest is brainwashing.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
Falling Through Space
It is doubtful whether our present system of popular education does not retard independent or self thinking as much as it promotes it. All genuine education is self-education. It will incite the individual to think for himself, by rethinking what the race's great thinkers have already thought for him, thus enabling him to go ahead under his own mental steam.
JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
The Field of Philosophy
That's what education should be ... the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way.
PLATO
The Republic
The key to fixing education is better teaching, and the key to better teaching is figuring out who can teach and who can't.
JONATHAN ALTER
Newsweek, Jun. 15, 2009
Institutional learning facilities are traps intended to control the mind, subdue the soul, and keep you in debt until you're too old to cause trouble.... Step-by-step, inch-by-inch they will kill your ingenuity. Brick by brick, they'll enclose your mind, telling you what's right to think and what isn't.
RICK REMENDER
Black Science, No. 15, June 2015
If good primary education is like the strong stem of any tree of a society, higher education is like the fruits of that tree which are reaped in the form of socio-economic, industrial and technological development ultimately leading any nation towards better quality of life.
SUKHDEV SINGH
"Higher Education in Punjab", Punjab Society: Perspectives and Challenges
Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
It depends on education--that holder of the keys which the Almighty hath put into our hands--to open the gates which lead to virtue or to vice, to happiness or misery.
PHILIP SIDNEY
Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney
A people uneducated is like an iron mountain whose ore is unwrought.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Spectator, Nov. 6, 1711
Try not to have a good time ... this is supposed to be educational.
CHARLES M. SCHULZ
There's No Time for Love
Education is in no small measure preparing the way for the intellectual life and pointing to it. Those who cannot enter in at its gates are doomed, in Leonardo da Vinci's words, to "possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world." For them life must be short, however many its years, and barren, however plentiful its acts. Their ears are deaf to the call of the indwelling Reason, and their eyes are blind to all the meaning and the values of human experience.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, Mar. 4, 1908
Those who exert the first influence upon the mind, have the greatest power.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim, rather than to learn.
SPIRO AGNEW
speech in Houston, May 22, 1970