Education Quotes

It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. ...It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education.

Bertrand Russell

If school success were a reliable index of human capacity, we should be able to go a step further and say that the intelligence test is a general measure of human capacity. But of course no such claim can be made for school success, for that would be to say that the purpose of the schools is to measure capacity. It is impossible to admit this. The childÂ’s success with school work cannot be a measure of a childÂ’s success in life. On the contrary, his success in life must be a significant measure of the schoolÂ’s success in developing the capacities of the child. If a child fails in school and then fails in life, the school cannot sit back and say: you see how accurately I predicted this. Unless we are to admit that education is essentially impotent, we have to throw back the childÂ’s failure at the school, and describe it as a failure not by the child but by the school.http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5172/

Walter Lippmann

Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.

Maria Montessori, 1948

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Maria Montessori

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

H. L. Mencken

I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them -- the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.

Thomas Merton

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

Charles Caleb Colton

Within the university... you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It's perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.

Jacques Derrida

Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.

Chuang Tzu

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law in journalism, literature and art.

Barry Commoner

I am less disposed to think of a West Point education as requisite for this business than I was at first. Good sense and energy are the qualities required.

Rutherford B. Hayes

All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting discrimination in public education must yield.

Earl Warren

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

Franz Kafka

Growing up, I was encouraged to get a good education, get a real job doing something I enjoyed, and, should the opportunity present itself, consider public service as just that: a chance to serve, not an end in itself.

John Sununu

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

John W. Gardner

I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.

David Rockefeller

Man is what he reads.

Joseph Brodsky

A child must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will to the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way through a dull routine of textbooks.

Helen Keller

Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.

William Glasser