Quotes About Education

his school lessons had been unusually

I didn't reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later, with the request "Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver," I'm sure it contained those as well.)

eight books every week from the time she was two—she had taken more than four thousand books out of that library.

If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time.

If you don't understand something, you should just try to learn more, that's all.

Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.

I've never taught anybody before . . ." He smiled up at her, willing confidence into her face, her eyes, her spine. "Look, you can probably kill the first two days just having them demonstrate what they know on each other, while you stand around and say "Um," and "Hm," and "God help us," and things like that.

Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance" ~ Bernard Shaw

What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.

These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

our ability to learn is regulated by how we are treated by our teachers, at home and in the classroom.

If I teach you reading and writing, I'm warning you I've got to hit you on the head and call you bad names when you're stupid, because that's how you do teaching.

The only ones worse off than us is borstal boys. Or those boys that get sent to public school, because if you think about it, them schools are really just posh borstal.

What's the matter with you? How can you, a musician, an educated man, come here with your mandolin and make beautiful tunes to a Greek, when all around you the island is pillaged and despoiled? And don't give me any of that shit about the restoration of the Roman Empire. If you really want to know, it was Greece that educated Rome, and we didn't do it by conquest either. What's the matter with you?

We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different.

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Knowledge was not meant to be locked behind doors. It breathes best in the open air where all men can inhale its essence.

Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long.

Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.

No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.