Quotes About Education

We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.

You know the theorem of Pythagoras?" "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides." "That's exactly it. And is that true for every example you've tried?" "Yes.

For a human being, nothing comes naturally," said Grumman. "We have to learn everything we do.

But if we get education right... it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time … - Isis lecture, 2003

The effect was as if each teacher was being examined by a fierce inspector, and each lesson became an ordeal in which not the pupils but the teachers were being tested.

Schools must take children to the theatre. This activity must be subsidised. Children should be able to join a youth theatre near where they live, and learn how to take part in every aspect of putting on a play. Places like that should be subsidised too. These things are not luxuries: they're essential to our wellbeing.

The classroom is a torture chamber , interrogating poetry until it confesses.

In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.

What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else, when the result is to wind up so far behind?

Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated

É muito difícil ler os clássicos; logo a culpa é dos clássicos. Hoje o estudante faz valer a sua incapacidade como um privilégio. Eu não consigo aprender isto, portanto alguma coisa está errada nisto. E há especialmente alguma coisa errada com o mau professor que quer ensinar tal matéria. Deixou de haver critérios - para só haver opiniões.

What do you do with the kid who can't read? ...Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them--so Coleman believed more often than not.

Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them.

Tanta istruzione, e non serve a nulla. Nulla può isolare dal più infimo livello del pensiero.

These ladies are not stupid, or ignorant. Mrs. Thompson can read both Latin and Spanish, and Ms. Voigtlander is a certified speech therapist who once explained to me that the strange gulping sound that makes NBC's Tom Brokaw so distracting to listen to is an actual speech impediment called a glottal L. It was one of the ladies out in the kitchen supporting Mrs. R—- who pointed out that 11 September is the anniversary of the Camp David Accords, which was certainly news to me. What

One or two factoids. Plato, né Aristocles, is c. 427–347 BCE; Aristotle is 384–322 BCE (compare Socrates at c. 470–399 and Zeno at c. 490–435). Aristotle was a former star pupil in Plato's Academy, the motto over the front door of which happened to be LET NO ONE WHO IS IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE. 18

The best teachers seem to acknowledge the conflict between their vocations, reach some kind of internal compromise, and go on.

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That

les Musulmans éduqués comme nous-mêmes commencions à penser que l'islam était le véritable obstacle qui avait empêché les masses algériennes de passer au XXe siècle. Lorsque

I don't know how other people feel about college, but to me, it's overrated. College gives you living experience in an environment where you have to be responsible for yourself—but very little more than that. If you learn anything, you've done it yourself.

To acclimate students to misery under the rubric that so doing prepares them for life is a cynical notion—and a horrifying one.

Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician. [Upon hearing that one of his students had dropped out to study poetry]

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across

promote the teaching in mosques and madrassas that Muslims must coexist peacefully as equals with infidels on a permanent basis. And they could oppose blasphemy laws, such as the anti-Islamophobia resolutions they are promoting, which are a direct assault on the American Bill of Rights.