Quotes About Education

What do you have in mind after you graduate? What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. I don't really know, I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.

To feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thicken; to feel the sex organs develop and call loudly to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moon-brains. I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn't know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomach-ache or all that caviar I had eaten.

Si uno hace algo incorrecto en la mesa con cierta arrogancia, como si supiera perfectamente que está haciendo lo que corresponde, puede salir del paso y nadie pensará que es grosero o que ha recibido una pobre educación. Pensarán que uno es original y muy ocurrente.

Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves

The day I went into physics class is was death.

Our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains.

I don't know what's the trouble with children these days. They seem to get worse and worse.

Mrs. Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first fingerbowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs. Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.

Cómo podría yo saber si algún día en la universidad, en Europa, en algún lugar, en cualquier lugar, la campana de cristal con sus asfixiantes distorsiones, no volvería a descender?

Y si mi tutora hubiera sabido cuán asustada estaba y cuán seriamente contemplaba posibles soluciones extremas, como el obtener un certificado médico que me declarara incapacitada para el estudio de la Química, en que constara que las fórmulas me mareaban y cosas por el estilo, estoy segura de que no me hubiera escuchado un solo minuto y me habría hecho hacer el curso a pesar de todo.

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I'd skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas. A friend of mine, also in honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets.

Buddy's father was a teacher, and I think Buddy could have been a teacher as well, he was always trying to explain things to me and introduce me to new knowledge.

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers...I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all of the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.