Quotes About Education

Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge. This

Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It might even be too kind to call this merely "anti-rational"; it is almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of mouth—except with all of it now sent along at the speed of electrons.

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In

While expertise isn't dead, however, it's in trouble. Something is going terribly wrong. The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.

None of us is a Da Vinci, painting the Mona Lisa in the morning and designing helicopters at night. That's as it should be. No, the bigger problem is that we're proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.

When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.

And yet the result has not been a greater respect for knowledge, but the growth of an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.

Liberal democracy depends on knowledge and virtue, and both of these are now in short supply among the citizens of the developed world.

College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience.

In 1943, incoming college freshmen—only 6 percent of whom could list the original thirteen colonies—named Abraham Lincoln as the first president and the one who "emaciated [sic] the slaves." The

The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions.

more exasperating is that there is no way to educate or inform people who, when in doubt, will make stuff up.

College as a client-centered experience caters to adolescents instead of escorting them away from adolescence. Rather than disabusing students of their intellectual solipsism, the modern university ends up reinforcing it.

A society that is post-factual is pre-fascist.

Just as we are not all equally able to carry a tune or draw a straight line, many people simply cannot recognize the gaps in their own knowledge or understand their own inability to construct a logical argument. Education

Some educators even repeat the old saw that "I learn as much from my students as they learn from me!" (With due respect to my colleagues in the teaching profession who use this expression, I am compelled to say: if that's true, then you're not a very good teacher.) The

Students, well intentioned or otherwise, are poorly served by the idea that students and teachers are intellectual and social equals and that a student's opinion is as good as a professor's knowledge. Rather than disabusing young people of these myths, college too often encourages them, with the result that people end up convinced they're actually smarter than they are.

A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. James Madison

What is different today, and especially worrisome when it comes to the creation of educated citizens, is how the protective, swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct a logical and informed argument. When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.

Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what's true and what's false, and where they learn to follow a model of scholarly inquiry no matter where it takes them. Instead, many colleges have become hostages to students who demand that their feelings override every other consideration.

Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves.

Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

One of our key strategies has been to restructure traditional high schools into small learning communities with personalized attention and a range of options.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.