Quotes About Education

A mountain of recent evidence suggests that teacher skill has less influence on a student's performance than a completely different set of factors: namely, how much kids have learned from their parents, how hard they work at home, and whether the parents have instilled an appetite for education.

For until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

offer an environment that is simply not conducive to learning.

But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago—who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed.

Furthermore, in some countries—Finland and Singapore and South Korea, for instance—future schoolteachers are recruited from the best college-bound students, whereas a teacher in the United States is more likely to come from the bottom half of her class.

I hope when my kids have kids, there are still books around, and I don't really care if mine are around, but I hope there are books around because I love the idea of that. I love doing this. I love doing a podcast, but to me, a book is a thing that has no equal.

Until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to.

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don't even have to think about reading once we've learned how to do it.

As CNN recently reported: "A decade of research in the business world proves happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as a myriad of health and quality-of-life improvements.

happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent

the Altered States Economy totals out to roughly $4 trillion a year. That's a sizable chunk of our income that we annually tithe to the Church of the Ecstatic. We spend more on this than we do on maternity care, humanitarian aid, and K–12 education combined." It's larger than the gross national product of Britain, India, or Russia. And to really put this in perspective, it's twice as many dollars as there are known galaxies in the entire

The standard explanation of the madness of crowds is ignorance: a mediocre education system has left the populace scientifically illiterate, at the mercy of their cognitive biases, and thus defenseless against airhead celebrities, cable-news gladiators, and other corruptions from popular culture.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.

The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.

Everything in human affairs is connected to everything else, and that is especially true of violence. Across time and space, the more peaceable societies also tend to be richer, healthier, better educated, better governed, more respectful of their women, and more likely to engage in trade

According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.

people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later. Topic-then-comment and given-then-new orderings are major contributors to coherence, the feeling that one sentence flows into the next rather than jerking the reader around.

As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functioning illiterates [...]. English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.

the [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.

Rousseau, who replaced the Christian notion of original sin with the romantic notion of original innocence. In his 1762 treatise Émile, or On Education, Rousseau wrote, "Everything is good as it leaves the hand of the Author of things, and everything degenerates in the hands of man.

Literate people should know how to think about grammar.

The view that humans are passive receptacles of stereotypes, words, and images is condescending to ordinary people and gives unearned importance to the pretensions of cultural and academic elites.

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