Quotes About Education

Die Pädagogik ist die Kunst, die Menschen sittlich zu machen.

In vain do we extend our view into the heavens, and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men, and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity; we need only draw the curtain of words, to behold the fairest tree of knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our hand.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangers than ignorance.

You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names?

He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

There is no physical gulf between the philosopher's class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that.

You see, we're all savages, more or less. We're supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names?

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you wouldn't read yourself.

Ive taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I'm seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood.

Hohe Bildung kann man dadurch beweisen, daß man die kompliziertesten Dinge auf einfache Art zu erläutern versteht.