To the University of Oxford I acknowlede no obligation, and she will as cheerfully
renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent
fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle
and unprofitable of my whole life.
Edward Gibbon
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education
Albert Einstein
Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.
Madeleine L'Engle
There is no accountability in the public school system - except for coaches. You know what
happens to a losing coach. You fire him. A losing teacher can go on losing for 30 years and
then go to glory.
Ross Perot
There is a great danger in the present day lest science teaching should degenerate into the
accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory
without cultivating the understanding.
J. D. Everett
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then
try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and
then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic
difficulties.
Alice Duer Miller
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
A technician is a man who understands everything about his job except its ultimate purpose and
its place in the order of the universe.
Sir Richard Livingston
I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no
contact with anything of any use in everyday life.
Petronius
Education is unique among consumer products when it fails to work as advertised, it's the
customer that gets labelled as defective.
Unknown
There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware
store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products buy soaking marijuana in ever
changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly
than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation?
How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex
monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test?
Senator Kohl
If I were seriously ill and in desperate need of a physician, and if by some miracle I could
secure either Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, or a young doctor fresh from the Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine, with his equipment comprising the latest developments in the
technologies and techniques of medicine, I should, of course, take the young doctor. On the
other hand, if I were commissioned to find a teacher for a group of adolescent boys and if, by
some miracle, I could secure either Socrates or the latest Ph.D. from Teachers College, with his
equipment of the latest technologies and techniques of teaching, with all due respect to the
College that employs me and to my students, I am fairly certain that I would jump at the
chance to get Socrates.
William C. Bagley
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.
R. Buckminster Fuller
They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a
being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in
everlasting antagonism with each other.
Emma Goldman
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at
last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges
are not an education, but the means of education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for
ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not
know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading
for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent overeducation from happening.
William Troy Harris
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is
practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
John W. Gardner
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Alec Bourne
And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual.
Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A
school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein
they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official
rubber stamps.
H. L. Mencken
He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a
cow to ride on.
Benjamin Franklin
The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these
are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily
penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
Jerome S. Bruner
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell
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
An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living
but doesn't teach them how to make a life.
unknown
Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth
reading.
G. M. Trevelyan
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and
vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
Aldous Huxley
An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living
but doesn't teach them how to make a life.
Unknown
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
Norman Douglas
The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of
disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
A. N. Whitehead
Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand A. Russell
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the
child.
George Bernard Shaw
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet
entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from
stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without
fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted
by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
Albert Einstein
Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
Robert G. Ingersoll
I find it appalling every time a professor of television at Syracuse University says this is a sign
of the dumbing down of America. I think it's a sign of the dumbing down of America that there
are professors of television at major universities.
Michael Davies
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves
great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future
dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
Bertrand Russell
Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads:
ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals
the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great
scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all.
Martin Gardner
It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in
the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by
an impartial survey of the world.
Bertrand Russell
The idea that the majority of students attend a university for an education independent of the
degree and grades is a hypocrisy everyone is happier not to expose. Occasionally some
students do arrive for an education but rote and mechanical nature of the institution soon
converts them to a less idealistic attitude
Robert M. Pirsig
When a parent asks a child, 'What did you learn in school today?' and the child says, 'Nothing
much', consider that the child may be giving a honest and accurate answer.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full
of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense
and common decency.
H.L. Mencken
If you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.
Robert F. Goheen
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
Margaret Mead
If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
Stanley Garn
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large
kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
Friedrich Nietzsche
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at
last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
This is the problem with the way you educate your children. You don't want your young ones
drawing their own conclusions. You want them to come to the same conclusions that you came
to. Thus you doom them to repeat the mistakes to which your own conclusions led you.
Neale Donald Walsch
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
If they believe only what they can see, why do we have classrooms?
Yul Brenner in The King And I
...There is no clear, commanding body of evidence that students' sustained use of multimedia
machines, the Internet, word processing, spreadsheets, and other popular applications has any
impact on academic achievement.
Larry Cuban
There is absolutely no evidence that the internet or the use of computers in and out of the
classroom enhance education in any way
James S. Taylor
Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable
disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of
books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.
Fran Lebowitz
The key to helping the next generation of American children be bright, literate, intellectually
self-sufficient, steeped in the most important areas of knowledge? It all comes down to
computers in the classrooms. Get rid of them.
Bob Greene