Quotes About Education

We do not organize education the way we see the world. If we did, we would have departments of Sky, Landscapes, Water, Wind, Sounds, Time Seashores, Swamps, and Rivers.

Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worst still, they appear to have a bigger bias blind spot, meaning they are less able to recognize the holes in their logic.

I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

College is the best thing that can ever happen to you, my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking..

I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous.

I thought about this for days, just as I thought of the special-ed teacher I met in Pittsburgh. You know, I said, I hear those words and automatically think Handicapped, or, Learning disabled. But aren't a lot of your students just assholes? You got it, she said. Then she told me about a kid - last day of class - who wrote on the blackboard, Mrs. J____ is a cock master. I was impressed because I'd never heard that term before. She was impressed because the boy had spelled it correctly.

The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.

the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.

If I'd been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.

What's wrong? he said. I'll tell you what's wrong: you're killing us. But I thought that's what you wanted? We did, my mother wept, but not this way. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life's work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.

Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to.

Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time.

He didn't understand that it's all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that rises its head and nods like cobra when you're sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it's even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education.

there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten.

Trying to explain moral principles to Khe Sahn was like reviewing a standard 1040 tax form with a house cat!

Today the teacher told us that a ripe Camembert should have the same consistency as a human eyebrow.

or the class moron will go on to become the president of the United States—though that's more likely to happen at Harvard or Yale, schools that will pretty much let in anybody.

Miss Spakey, isn't it ironic that while I was busy adding and subtracting you were dividing and trying to multiply.' " I know this is bad.

Give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.

They were taught to be technicians, not thinkers, in a culture that is long on know-how and short on know-why.

Education and Slavery were incompatible with each other. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1845

the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival-the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will save us.

knowledge increased, but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.