Quotes About Education

Curiosity is the engine of achievement.

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don't know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn't really care.

Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.

We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and "deindividuation" but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.

Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing can happen to a great mind.

But I love the teaching: the hard work of a first class, the fun of the second class. Then the misery of the third.

I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska.

As universities have turned into businesses, so students have turned into consumers.

Education is not a product but a relationship and a process; a relationship between student and lecturer, and process by which knowledge transforms the individual.

Faith, wrote Origen (185–245), perhaps the first great Christian theologian, is 'useful for the multitude', a means of teaching 'those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons'.

When we downshift Christian education from the paradigm of expertise to a paradigm of love, we do not dilute the importance of rigorous theological reflection. On the contrary, inverting the order of instruction makes serious inquiry all the more likely. We learn best what we love most.

It might be useful to think about authoritarianism, totalitarianism, or any kind of dictatorship in the same way we think about dangerous, life-threatening, infectious diseases. The best prevention against such a disease is to build immunity. Education is like a vaccination. Understanding history is part of the process of making ourselves more immune to the dangers of dictatorship.

how the innate and insatiable curiosity young children have about the world gets absolutely killed by the tedium of school.

Of course, on a map oriented along the lines of this jingle: North to the ceiling, South to the floor, West to the window, East to the door it did appear that the Nile River flowed up. I can't tell you much else about what happened in that classroom that year.

Sometimes we have to unlearn things before we can learn the right things.

My graduate studies were carried out at the California Institute of Technology.

My grandfather on my mother's side was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology my other grandfather was a lawyer, and one time Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

The role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.

I knew nothing of the matter, so said nothing. It made me feel rather downcast, all this knowledge locked away in books that I didn't know and likely never would. I loved books, but they were expensive and heavy and reading them took time I rarely had.

The new strategy is to teach intelligent design without calling it intelligent design.

I was a weedy kid, not like one of those working-class men who can accommodate not being academically clever by physical strength and prowess.