Quotes About Education

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal society can not exist unless it goes on.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

For people who had been prohibited from learning to read and write as slaves, reading offered tangible proof that they were really free.

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant. —AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT.

Teaching English literature would have seemed to us like teaching a hungry man the way to his mouth when he had a feast before him. Almost

There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, the third is by example.

The fundamental rights of [humanity] are, first: the right of habitation; second, the right to move freely; third, the right to the soil and subsoil, and to the use of it; fourth, the right of freedom of labor and of exchange; fifth, the right to justice; sixth, the right to live within a natural national organization; and seventh, the right to education.

We have to have that education. We have to have it. We have to master the western culture. We have to master the English language. It's the only way we can strengthen and fortify our own way of life. We have to know who we are working with and how to work with them.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Alcuin was my name: learning I loved.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. And ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.

Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental wealth and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?

There is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain [...] Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another

It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life.

Um dos castigos impostos por uma educação ecológica é viver solitariamente em um mundo ferido. Para um leigo, muitos dos danos causados à Terra são invisíveis. Um ecologista deve se embrutecer e fazer de conta que não tem nada a ver com as consequências da ciência, ou deve ser como um médico que vê marcas da morte em uma comunidade que acredita estar saudável e não quer ser convencida do contrário.