Quotes About Education

It was even a saying among the philosophers themselves that since learned men had appeared, honest men were nowhere to be found.

Education does not make a man good; it only makes him clever—usually for mischief. Instinct and feeling are more trustworthy than reason.

One of his practical principles was to attend most to those pupils who were of middle ability; the dunces, he said, were beyond all help, and the geniuses would help themselves.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, . . . but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.

Bacon had done it, and Campanella had said, with Baconian pithiness, Tantum possumus quantum scimus —"Our power is proportioned to our knowledge." Perhaps

Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free commonwealth arts and sciences will be better cultivated to the full if every one that asks leave is allowed to teach publicly, at his own cost and risk.

Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years, you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man's understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.

Do you know," asks Emerson, "the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and In that I am his pupil.

Education is the reason why we behave like human beings. We are hardly born human. We are born ridiculous, malodorous animals. We become human. We have humanity thrust upon us through the hundred channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance--whose preservation, emulation, and transmission places mankind today, with all of its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plain than any generation has ever reached before.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

Democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education; not the rotation of every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office.

Some books are to be tasted," reads a famous passage, "others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested";

The elements of instruction . . . should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge . . . . Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536).

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind.

La educacion es el progresivo descubrimiento de nuestra propia ignorancia.

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child

Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that "you mustn't enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it." However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

And finally there must be education—some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore and heritage of the tribe—its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts—must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals into men.

civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.

For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization.

the Ann Arbor, Michigan, School Board, near where I live, had a debate as to whether the primary mission of their schools was imparting knowledge or raising self-esteem. Self-esteem won.