Quotes About Education

The great works of art and literature have a lot to say on how to tackle the concrete challenges of living, like how to escape the chains of public opinion, how to cope with grief or how to build loving friendships. Instead of organizing classes around academic concepts — 19th-century French literature — more could be organized around the concrete challenges students will face in the first decade after graduation.

I make honorable things pleasant to children." A teacher from Sparta

How do you teach a classroom of Sybils who are breaking apart and reforming right in front of you?

A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.

Those born in the poorest quarter of American society have an 8% chance of earning a college degree. Those born in the wealthiest quarter of American society have a 75% chance of earning a college degree.

Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history.

Students are taught how to do things, but many are not forced to reflect on why they should do them or what we are here for.

What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self).

Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs.

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school. 42% of college students never read another book after college. 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year. 70% of US adults have not been to a bookstore in the last five years. 57% of new books are not read to completion. Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah ' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know.

the strongest predictor of students' success is related to their social circumstances. The social, intellectual, and fiscal resources, or "capital," students bring with them into schools, whether charter or traditional, are much more important than the structure of the school or even the quality of the teachers

private school teachers tend to have fewer credentials and to cling to traditional teaching styles, such as lecturing while students sit in rows and take notes. Public school teachers, by contrast, are much more likely to be certified, to hold higher degrees, and to embrace research-based innovations in curriculum and pedagogy

evidence that suggests private schools, on average, do not offer students a competitive edge in academic performance over their peers in public schools,

The White middle and governing classes wish both to reduce the cost of public education to themselves and to find protected privilege for their children and grandchildren in segregated schools. Many of the myths that you will encounter in what follows serve both of these ends: Cut the cost of schooling; and further segregate schools to the advantage of the White middle class.

I have a liberal arts English degree, so I was brought up thinking that's what it was all about, and I had to learn that sometimes, or often times, art just is. It's not attempting at anything. It's not providing answers. I had to grow up a little bit before I got to that.

new forms of contraception, new methods of child rearing, and new forms of education and public welfare have provoked a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles.

as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.

You learn more by reading more. I'm living proof that the more you learn, the more you earn.

These bills include hundreds of thousands of economic migrants who, after years in the UK, probably still can't believe that British taxpayers are stupid enough to give them free housing, free education, free healthcare and £20,000 or £30,000 or even £40,000 a year for producing ever more children without ever having to do a day's work.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the life of a secondary schoolmaster was as miserable as it has ever been,

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.