Quotes About Education

we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? Here

Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.

Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.

The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.

Admito que es un tanto injusto esperar que los educadores encuentren, por sí solos, relatos que puedan reafirmar nuestra cultura nacional. Unas narraciones así deben llegarles, hasta cierto punto, de la esfera política. Si nuestra política está empobrecida simbólicamente, resulta difícil imaginar cómo pueden proporcionar los profesores un objetivo de peso a la educación.

The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control.

As a television show, and a good one, "Sesame Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.

Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.

From public schools shall general knowledge flow, For 'tis the people's sacred right to know.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. ~Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (introduction), 1982

Question asking is the most important intellectual tool we have.

everyone practices stupidity, including those of us who write about it; none of us is ever free of it, we are most seriously endangered when we think we are safe. That there is an almost infinite supply of stupidity, including our own, should provide educationists with a sense of humility and, incidentally, assurance that they will never become obsolete.

Thomas Jefferson. . . knew what schools were for--to ensure that citizens would know when and how to protect their liberty. . . It would not have come easily to the mind of such a man, as it does to political leaders today, that the young should be taught to read exclusively for the purpose of increasing their economic productivity.

One would have thought that the school room is the proper place for students to inquire into the ways in which media of all kinds—including television—shape people's attitudes and perceptions.

And, in the end, what will the students have learned? They will, to be sure, have learned something about whales, perhaps about navigation and map reading, most of which they could have learned just as well by other means. Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to.

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

skip a day's class

We ought to forget all this silliness about fund-raising and public relations and get back to what we do best. Educating the young." As we watched Babson laugh and

You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy.

A sense of responsibility in teaching pushes us constantly to think about and promote the best interests of our students. In contrast, the demand for accountability often induces mere compliance.

It still amazes me that we insist on teaching algebra to all students when only about 20 percent will ever use it and fail to teach anything about parenting when the vast majority of our students will become parents.