Quotes About Education

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice—

However, all this reading had disturbed their brains.

Read in order to live

The head-master made a

He sent him to bed in an unheated room and taught him to gulp down large amounts of rum and shout insults at church processions.

Classiques (les). On est censé les connaître.

Nem nehéz dolog m?velt embernek látszani, annyi az egész mesterség, hogy ne fogasd rajta magadat valami tudatlanságon. Az ember manÅ'verezik, elsikkasztja a nehézségeket, megkerüli az akadályokat, s egy lexikon segítségével lefÅ'z mindenkit. Minden ember olyan buta, mint a liba, és olyan tudatlan, mint a szamár.

La dificultad no está en las nuevas ideas, sino en superar las antiguas que, para todos los que hemos sido educados como la mayoría, se ramifican hacia cada rincón de nuestra mente.» John Maynard Keynes

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it. Benjamin Disraeli

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. FRANCIS BACON, "OF STUDIES

Of course, I could holler Religious Persecution. Not that it would do any good. But it's something I happen to know quite a bit about, seeing as Religious Persecution was my assignment in Social Studies that time we studied Man's Inhumanity to Man. The idea was to write a two-thousand-word report proving how everybody has been a shit to everybody else through the ages, and where did it ever get them? This is supposed to improve us somehow, I guess.

Yeah, I should be in college, Mom, but I'm not. The world is my classroom, and one day I'll write a book, and that will be my degree.

Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.

I]f a current president of Harvard were to preach the theology of Increase Mather he would be locked up as a lunatic, though he is still free (and expected) to merchant the prevailing political balderdash. Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas.

OUR ISLAND STORY

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

Those who can -- do. Those who can't -- teach.

To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. (writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury )

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions. Thus it is pleasant to remember Cleveland, and to speak of him from time to time. He was the last of the Romans. If pedagogy were anything save the puerile racket that it is he would loom large in the schoolbooks. As it is, he is subordinated to Lincoln, Roosevelt I and Wilson. This is one of the things that are the matter with the United States.