Quotes About Education

Academically, I was never that interested. I skipped classes. My biggest dream was to have a coffee shop, but I had no idea how to get the money to do that.

It's ignorance, and it's upsetting. Look at the young; they have no idea how great this country is because they never have been outside of it.

I didn't know who Avedon was. I was 18 years old. I dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. I had no idea.

As long as I really stay on top of my school work, which I'm for the most part able to do, it's really no problem, me missing school.

Los buenos profesores no tiene precio. Te inspiran, te entretienen y acabas aprendiendo más de lo que esperabas...

Studeren was niet het echte leven. Het was een fantasiewereld, dat wist ze, en totaal anders dan de wereld waarin ze over een paar maanden terecht zou komen. In tegenstelling tot een echte baan, begonnen haar colleges pas om tien uur en waren ze vaak rond twee uur afgelopen. Avonden en weekenden werden meestal alleen maar aan plezier, gezelligheid en het verleggen van grenzen besteed.

Your kids don't watch a lot of television.

There is no teaching, there is only learning' over and over.

You can write a three-decker novel or a whole history of Transylvania without knowing or caring in the least what the parts of speech are—and in first grade, unless you're an unusual little person who takes an Aristotelian pleasure in verbal classification, it's an unnecessary encumbrance and a distraction.

anthology knowledge isn't real knowledge.

I hadn't helped anybody learn anything, I'd just allowed them to be themselves; I was there for a day to ensure that room 18 didn't descend into utter chaos. My role was to function as straight man, to give these kids the pleasure of avoiding meaningless schoolwork. And that was maybe a useful role.

I don't want to be a substitute teacher who forces teenagers to shake hands with the dead. All they want to do is flirt and joke and get through the day.

Ava was obviously observant, an enthusiast of spring: she'd seen the white frog and the two baby flies killed by the bus driver. And she was a better reader and speller than the others. I told her she could get a book to read, but she didn't want to do that, either. Instead, she got out her poetry notebook. Poor thing: she was already fed up with being asked to do inane worksheets and she was only in kindergarten. Twelve more years to go.

Hazel wanted Mrs. Willett to help her with the spelling of teeth, but Mrs. Willett was, like many reading teachers, a believer in the primal importance of do-it-yourself phonetics, which supposedly built self-esteem and independent thinking habits—even when a kid was obviously eager to know what the real spelling was.

one of the main things that school taught, I realized, was how to lie to get by.

Why isn't the pioneer of perforation chiseled into the façades of libraries, along with Locke, Franklin, and the standard bunch of French Encyclopedists?

How was this helping these kids learn their times tables? All it was doing was rewarding the smart kids who already knew them. For the minority who didn't it was just another brief storm of shame.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

Reading begets reading.

The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn't; as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self confident and I am incontinent... they have opinions and I have lists.

What a terrible thing an education was, he thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it.

I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.