Quotes About Education

Facts which were new to me were daily presenting themselves to my mind.

Whether you reed or rite, accustom yourselves to stand at a high desk

If anybody thinks they should listen to me because I'm a professor at MIT, that's nonsense. You should decide whether something makes sense by its content, not by the letters after the name of the person who says it.

State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect. It was a lesson learned by Hitler and many others, and it has been pursued to this day.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.

Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves- and that's a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you're looking at has to somehow catch people's interest and make them want to think, and make them want to pursue and explore.

The issue is whether we want to live in a free society or whether we want to live under what amounts to a form of self-imposed totalitarianism, with the bewildered herd marginalized, directed elsewhere, terrified, screaming patriotic slogans, fearing for their lives, and admiring with awe the leader who saved them from destruction, while the educated masses goose-step on command and repeat the slogans they're supposed to repeat and the society deteriorates at home.

the way they put it, we as a society have decided not to modify the society but to modify the children.

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.

intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

The more you learn, the more you realize the less you know. You think you're approaching some kind of horizon, but in fact the horizon is receding, and the more you learn, the more you see that horizon is very far away

Far from creating independent thinkers, schools have always, throughout history, played an institutional role in a system of control and coercion. And once you are well educated you have already been socialized in ways that support the power structure, which, in turn, rewards you immensely.

The tendency in K–12 is reducing education to mechanical skills, and undermining creativity and independence—both on the part of teachers and students. That's what "teaching to the test" is, "No Child Left Behind," "Race to the Top." I think these should be regarded as methods of indoctrination and control. Of course, one of the other ways to do that has been to simply reduce or eliminate free education.

teaching should not be compared to filling a bottle with water but rather to helping a flower to grow in its own way.

Education doesn't determine how you earn, education determines how you spend.

At Harvard they teach people how to rule the world and at MIT they teach them how to make the world work. This is for the elite schools. For the rest, turn them into servants.

It means that students, if they don't come from very wealthy families, they're going to leave college with big debts. And if you have a big debt, you're trapped. I mean, maybe you wanted to become a public interest lawyer, but you're going to have to go into a corporate law firm to pay off those debts. And by the time you're part of the culture, you're not going to get out of it again.

There are major efforts to replace public schools with semi-privatized systems that would still be supported by the public but run more or less privately, such as charter schools. There is no evidence that they are any better. For all we know, they're even worse. But this privatization of schools does undermine solidarity and mutual support--dangerous ideas that harm concentrated power.

Las personas educadas bajo un modelo domesticador no son capaces de interconectar las piezas y distinguir dos dimensiones.

Los maestros tienen la obligación de investigar y difundir la verdad sobre los temas más significativos, sobre los temas que importan.

La escuela impide la difusión de verdades esencial.