Talk:Education

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Education page.


Pedagogy[edit]

There is only a "teachers" and not "teaching" page. The sociologist Piaget has good quotes in his book (which may be a spin-off of Librairie du Recueil's “A Structural Foundation for Tomorrow’s Education," Piaget's only source):

There are more good quotes, but they fit more into other categories, besides pedagogy, such that relate to autodidactism--“diplomas that signify the end of all secondary studies” p. 62--and one that would best fit in the page on learning: “...lead the child to construct for himself the tools that will transform him from the inside--that is, in a real sense and not only on the surface.” p. 121.

The reason I did not put in these quotes: I am new (and have not read how to properly edit--yet). Aeroadam (talk) 02:27, 5 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You will learn by doing. Remember that Wikipedia's and Wikiquote's unofficial motto is be bold. I added your second quote, but not the first one, because I don't really understand it. --Spannerjam (talk) 19:45, 7 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization[edit]

Be there a reason we have all the sections in lowercase? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 209.89.146.105 (talkcontribs) 00:56, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The above editor changed the all-lowercase headings to mostly-uppercase. I later changed them to the correct sentence case form per Wikiquote:Manual of style. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:13, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is Einstein's quote really against education systems?[edit]

Thus, the wit was not wrong who defined education in this way: "Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

For this reason I am not at all anxious to take sides in the struggle between the followers of the classical philologic-historical education and the education more devoted to natural science.

On Education: Einstein, 1931 -- an address at the State University of New York http://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~kalya... "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. -- Einstein"

To me that's saying that when you learn things in school, you develop. Later on, you forget the things you've learned, but the development remains.

Is there evidence that Einstein intended this quote to be against education systems? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 218.215.19.6 (talkcontribs) 03:06, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I moved the Einstein quote to the general unsourced section. This is the hazard of attempting to interpret quotes (by categorizing them, as this article does) instead of just reporting them and including sources. Without a source, we have no way of knowing exactly what Einstein's context was. What happens is that quote services propagate the quote without its context, and people just read into the quote whatever they wish to. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:47, 14 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've corrected the wording and attribution of "Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten." According to the authoritative Yale Book of Quotations (searchable through Google Books) it was by James Bryant Conant as a Harvard Freshman in 1910-1911, not B.F. Skinner. Nor Albert Einstein (I've removed the quote from Unsourced). 4granite 04:40, 6 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Bush-isms"[edit]

There are several so called "Bush-isms" near in the For Education section. All they are is Bush fumbling with the english language. So he isn't a good speaker. The quotes have no real value, so should be deleted. -SgtHydra

Mary Wollstonecraft[edit]

I think a cultural misunderstanding has led to the Mary Wollstoncraft quote being wrongly interpreted as an argument against state education. Wollstonecraft's work focused on the lack of universal access to education for middle class women in England, and that this inequality manifested itself in the subordinate role women held in society at that stage. Her argument was that the provision of universal education was the only means by which females could aspire to the same status as men. In the UK, a public school is not synonymous with a state school; public school was initially meant in the sense that it was open to the general public, if they could afford to pay the enrollment fees, so the distinction in the UK was between public schools (privately funded) and state schools (publically funded), meaning that the 'public schools' Woolstonecraft was referring to were almost certainly not part of a state education system.

"Public school" is still used in Britain for independent, fee-paying, non-state schools, especially the most prestigious of them such as Harrow and Eton, which Wollstonecraft visited. See Public school.
Quite right. I have moved the quote from the section on state education. (See also English language#British vs. American English). ~ Ningauble 18:49, 17 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Education Quotes[edit]

When you Discuss about the education, education is the thing which is not only necessary to get the job. But it is also important to produce the gentlemen for the societies, to understand the Religions, understand the humanity, understand how to live life in different circumstances. Education give light to your dark paths in the way of your Life paths. When you look at the education financial benefits these are endless. You can earn as much as you can using your skills. Work in your interesting fields, give you chance to enhance your skills and talent and proof yourself in the world. So many great writers writes many Education Quotes like Bertrand A. Russell, William Lowe Bryan, Sir Winston Churchill and many others just to promote the value and benefits of the education.

Hoyt's plugged in[edit]

I have added a section of quotes from the public domain collection in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations. Some of these will likely duplicate quotes already in this article, hopefully allowing currently unsourced quotes to be deleted. Cheers! BD2412 T 16:08, 17 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Unsourced[edit]

If you can provide a precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Education.

General[edit]

  • Learning is like a jigsaw puzzle. When you first lay the pieces out, it doesn't make much sense. When you start to connect the pieces, you then begin to see how it all fits together.
  • Knowledge is a wild thing, it must be hunted before being tamed.
    • Anonymous
  • Gosh, its a lot like school here isn't it?
    • Anonymous, on being in jail
  • "Regarding testing, students are like flowers. If we keep measuring them, will grow?"
    • Anonymous
  • We cannot violate the principles of liberty in regard to education without furnishing at once a precedent and inducement toviolate them in regard to other matters.
  • Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
  • Education is what is left after all that has been learnt is forgotten.
  • Here's a lesson for all teachers: You may know what you're saying, but you never know what you're teaching.
  • Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
  • The difference between a man and an animal is that a man is educated and animals are not.
  • An education is the investment with the greatest returns
  • What we need is to justify coercion, paternalistic control, blame, scolding, and punishment - all of which are less evident in trigonometry class than in a fourth grade learning long division.(...) I have argued that blame, scolding, and punishment in public schools - what I have called "the ordeal" - can be successfully defended. Students have a duty to learn, and can be held responsible for violating whatever rules, policies, or instructions are enforced to ensure that they do so.
    • Charles Howell - Syracuse University: Education, Punishment, and Responsibility broken link
  • Self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
  • Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
  • To be well-informed is to have the world at your fingers.
  • "I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old."
  • School is punishment for the crime of being young.
    • Nana Lee
  • The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
  • If it should happen that the arbitrary character of the delimitation imposed by school taxonomies, between what deserves to be taught(the "classics") and what does not, be unmasked when, for instance, the inertia of the educational system, with its tendency to retain on the syllabus anything that has ever found its way there, goes too directly against interests of this or that category of privileged users-the principles underlying these hierarchies and, a fortiori, the petitio principi implied in the very fact of hierarchization are neither perceived nor challenged because by following arbitrary indoctrination whose tendency is to conceal the arbitrary character of that indoctrination and of what it has taught, the differences produced by the application of arbitrary hierarchization principle are experienced as being part of the objects which they differentiate, as it were logically pre-exists the principle of which they are products.
    • London Times Literary Supplement
  • That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
  • Mrs. Garrison: Principal Victoria, it is wrong! [she's at the principal's office, her back to the principal's desk.] It is wrong and I simply will not do it! [walks back to the desk] I care about my students, and I will not fill their heads with lies! [pounds the desk for emphasis] I am NOT teaching evolution in my class!!
Principle Victoria: Mrs. Garrison, evolution is in the school curriculum. We have to teach it.
Mrs. Garrison: Evolution is a theory! A hare-brained theory that says I'm a monkey! I am not a monkey!! I'm a woman!
Mr. Macket: M, m'kay. Ya-you realize evolution has been pretty much uhhh... proven.
Mrs. Garrison: I warn you, Principal Victoria! Those students are not prepared to hear this stuff!
Principle Victoria: Our students want to learn, Mrs. Garrison, and they're mature enough to handle anything.
  • Teach a man to reason, and he will think for a lifetime.
    • Phil Plait
  • "The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called 'truth.'"
  • The better the citizenry as a whole are educated, the wider and more sensible public participation, debate and social mobility will be...Highly sophisticated Élites are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace.
  • The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead
    • George Saville
  • The child is regarded as a sort of a little beast, a kind of young ape, at best a little savage. The child, accordingly, is trained to act not by the light of reason, but by the command of superior force. The child is ruled by fear. Our young generation is trained by fear into discipline and obedience. We thus suppress the natural genius and originality of the child, we favor and raise mediocrity, and cultivate the philistine, the product of education, ruled by rod, not by thought.
    • Boris Sidis, Lecture on the abuse of the fear instinct in early education
  • It has been written that Boris "laid down a course of study for him in infancy." Nothing could be sillier. We tried to cultivate his curiosity on all subjects, and when he asked to answer fully, and to lead him to a greater curiosity so that he would go and find out for himself. But we never tried to push him an inch along any mental path in which he was not interested.
  • Whatever you would have your children become, strive to exhibit in your own lives and conversation.
  • Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.
  • College is about three things: homework fun and sleep ... but you can only choose two.
  • Education Public - "It is established that education is absolutely vital for an advancing society, the point I am arguing is that state education creates a level playing field for all students regardless of colour, creed and class.
    • Julien V. Tempone, youth of the year award winner; for this exert on his speech on equality, 2006
  • Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
    • George Macaulay Trevelyan
  • Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Self-education and home education[edit]

  • "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
  • I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
  • "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
  • The education of a man is never completed until he dies.
  • All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

Raising children[edit]

  • Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.
  • "To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
  • You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
  • The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
  • Let any one examine the pedagogic literature of the present; he who is not shocked at its utter poverty of spirit and its ridiculously awkward antics is beyond being spoiled. Here our philosophy must not begin with wonder but with dread; he who feels no dread at this point must be asked not to meddle with pedagogic questions.
  • A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
    • George Santayana

Goal of education[edit]

  • [Schools are] "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products... manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.
  • Every teacher should realize... that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the secring of the right social growth.
  • We shall not make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from amonth them authors, educatiors, poets or men of letters... The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things [obediance] their fathers and mothers are doing in a imperfect way.
  • But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy: that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly.
    • Plato, Greek philosopher (c. 428–c. 348)
  • Educate the heart. Let us have good men.
  • Education would be much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every student should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
  • If we are to reach real peace in this world ... we shall have to begin with the children.
  • No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
    • Emma Goldman, Lithuanian-American anarchist writer, lecturer and activist (1869-1940)
  • The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
  • Life doesn't revolve around what you need to know, it revolves around what you need to understand.
  • Education is a method by which one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

Role models[edit]

  • Children need models rather than critics.
  • "A poor teacher complains, an average teacher explains, a good teacher teaches, a great teacher inspires."
  • The prime task of public education, as it came widely to be understood in this country, was political: to make the citizen more knowledgeable and thus better able to think and to judge of public affairs. In time, the function of education shifted from the political to the economic: to train people for better-paying jobs and thus to get ahead. This is especially true of the high-school movement, which has met the business demands for white-collar skills at the public's expense. In large part education has become merely vocational; in so far as its political task is concerned, in many schools, that has been reduced to a routine training of nationalist loyalties.
  • "Don't worry that children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you."
  • I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates a climate. My daily mood makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be the tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor. Hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized.
  • The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children.
  • "The question for the child is not 'Do I want to be good?' but 'Whom do I want to be like?'"
  • The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
  • Music education begins nine months before the birth of the mother.
  • It is the kindness and not the harshness in the headmaster's voice that pushes tough boys to cry.
    • Yiddish proverb

Against education[edit]

Against the conventional educational system (school)[edit]

  • Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
  • School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, so why practice?
  • "I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
  • Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
  • Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
  • Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent
  • There is no human reason why a child should not admire and emulate his teacher's ability to do sums, rather than the village bum's ability to whittle sticks and smoke cigarettes. The reason why the child does not is plain enough - the bum has put himself on an equality with him and the teacher has not.
  • Whatever the explanation, it's perfectly obvious that our educational system has nothing to do with education: it's a babysitting service designed to replicate the worst qualities of the parents.
  • How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
  • Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.
  • 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.
  • Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines.
  • The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
  • When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling
  • 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.
  • There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
  • Talent develops in tranquillity, character in the full current of human life."
  • Instead of studying for finals, what about just going to the Bahamas and catching some rays? Maybe you'll flunk, but you might have flunked anyway; that's my point.
  • No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
  • Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.
  • Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.
  • [Schools:] vast factories for the manufacture of robots.
    • Robert Lindner (1914-1956)
  • School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.
  • The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
  • Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age purports to equip us to live and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything from juvenile delinquency to premature senility.
  • I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
  • 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.
  • Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
  • Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
  • Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality—and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.
  • Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
  • Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
  • Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
    • Albert Edward Wiggam
  • when a snowflake falls from the sky it is individual and unique but the moment it is brought into a class room everyone turns into the same drop of water.
  • As you can see, I have memorized this utterly useless piece of information long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You've taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations.

Against state education[edit]

  • America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
  • Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.
  • The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately... education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence. in Grosvenor Square.
  • To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
  • The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called school, equipped with tortures called education.
  • Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
  • Years of centralized education have produced nothing but failure and frustrated parents. We can resurrect our public school system if we follow the Constitution and end the federal education monopoly.
  • Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.

For education[edit]

For state education[edit]

  • Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
  • Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
  • I just love the idea of a school in which people come to get educated and stay in the state in which they're educated.
  • The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of the fantastic opportunistic society.
  • Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin ... the great equalizer of the conditions of men - the balance-wheel of the social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.
  • I know, (there is) no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of society, but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.
  • Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry.
    • Ellwood P. Cubberley, future Dean of education at Stanford, in his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College.
  • Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
  • The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. … It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
  • We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
    • Woodrow Wilson in a speech to businessmen, and from an address to The New York City High School Teachers Association, Jan. 9th, 1909
  • It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.
  • In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present eduction conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
  • Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
    • Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education, from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935
  • "Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. "Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the "wants' of a single family rather than the "needs' of society.
    • Association of California School Administrators
  • When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
    • Albert Shanker, Former President of the American Federation of Teachers
  • Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

Should we add Caitlin Upton's quote about education?[edit]

"If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn."[edit]

The above quote (or slight variations on it) is widely cited to "Ignacio 'Nacho' Estrada", a "ventriloquist, motivator and educational consultant" (according to his website). Here's an example of such citation: Teaching Generation Text (from Google Books). He is not the person (listed on FindAGrave) who died in 2010, since he is listed as having given performances in 2014 (Photo on Facebook). I'm not sure the quote is sufficiently notable to be included on the main page, but I thought it worth documenting what I could find out about the provanence of it here. JesseW (talk) 20:53, 11 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a variant of a quote found from the early 1970s: "If a boy can't learn the way we teach, we'd better teach the way he can learn". Mr Estrada is Director of Grants Administration at Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; his LinkedIn page indicates that he graduated college in 1992, so I'm pretty confident he didn't invent it. Grover cleveland (talk) 20:41, 8 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

To be alphabetized[edit]

  • Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
  • The parents who are unwilling to permit their children to undergo a course of training under strict discipline, are the ones who deserve the reproof. In the first place, everything they possess, including the children, is devoted to ambition.
  • Exercises in being obedient can not begin too early, and I have, during an almost daily observation of six years, discovered no harm from an early, consistent guiding of the germinating will, provided only this guiding be done with the greatest mildness and justice, as if the infant had already an insight into the benefits of obedience.
  • The old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things by a rapid sort of first "intellection," an error that made all departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been banished everywhere save from moral and religious training, where it still persists in full force. (...) But parents are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments concerning matters of conduct are, at first, very feeble,and that the sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship of external authority.
  • Thus Vikramâditja was brought up in a strange land, but was exercised in all kinds of arts; and increased in strength, well-favoured in mind and body. He learned wisdom of the wise, and the use of arms from men of valour; from the soothsayer learned he cunning arts, and trading from sagacious traders; from robber bands learned he the art of robbery, and from fraudulent dealers to lie.
  • The real nature of education is at variance with the account given of it by certain of its professors.
  • Good teaching comes from good people.
  • Man must develop his tendency towards the good.
  • In the world of knowledge, the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with effort.
    • Plato, "The Allegory of the Cave".
  • The most important thing is that the natural will of the child be broken.
  • A close watch must be kept on the children, and they must never be left alone anywhere, whether they are in ill or good health. This constant supervision should be exercised gently and with a certain trustfulness calculated to make them think that one loves them, and that it is only to enjoy their company that one is with them. This will make them love their supervision rather than fear it.
    • Advice to Jesuit school ushers at Port Royal 1615; as quoted in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter comics, 1941-1948 pp. 99-100
  • O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood.
  • School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
  • Thirty years ago it seemed right that there be no stigma in education and that everyone should get the same start in life, but there are problems in mixing everyone together. I was never happy about the inclusion of children with severe autistic problems in schools, for example, and I certainly don't think it is working today.
  • At school boys become gluttons and slovens, and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, very early rush into libertinism which destroys the constitution before it is formed; hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding.
    • Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects" (1792).
  • There is not, perhaps, in the kingdom, a more dogmatical, or luxurious set of men, than the pedantic tyrants who reside in colleges and preside at public schools.
    • Mary Wollstonecraft, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects" (1792). (In British English "public school" means what Americans call "private school": nongovernmental institutions that are open to the public for a price.).
  • A government system of education in Prussia is not inconsistent with the theory of Prussian society, for there all wisdom is supposed to be lodged in the government. But the thing is wholly inadmissible here . . . because, according to our theory, the people are supposed to be wiser than the government. Here, the people do not look to the government for light, for instruction, but the government looks to the people. The people give the law to the government. To entrust, then, the government with the power of determining the education which our children shall receive is entrusting our servant with the power to be our master. This fundamental difference between the two countries, we apprehend, has been overlooked by the board of education and its supporters.
    • Orestes Brownson, Testimony against proposed Truancy Laws before the Massachusetts Board of Education, 19th Century
  • Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
  • There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.
  • I would promise the whole amount were I not afraid that someday my gift might be abused for someone's selfish purposes, as I see happen in many places where teachers' salaries are paid from public funds. There is only one remedy to meet this evil: if the appointment of teachers is left entirely to the parents, and they are conscientious about making a wise choice through their obligation to contribute to the cost.
    • Pliny the Younger, Letters and Panegyricus, Book IV, XIII; London, 1969, William Heinemann, p. 277-283; writing to his friend Tacitus almost two thousand years ago, describing his plan to establish a secondary school in his home town, but adding that he had decided to pay only one third of the total cost.
  • The school that flies the flag is, in the long run accountable to that flag and to the power and values which is represents.
    • Jonathan Kozol, as quoted by Robin Small, in "Marx and education".
  • Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents... The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.
  • Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is compulsory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned and punished for trying to escape - in short, in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?
    • Royce Van Norman, "School Administration: Thoughts on Organization and Purpose," Phi Delta Kappan 47 (1966):315-16.
  • This has become the most notable feature of the recent history of European 'education': the enterprise of substituting 'socialization' for education. … The design here is to reduce or abolish disparities in opportunity and thus to generate a 'fully integrated' society. Here, however, the design and its imposition upon the educational engagement are inseperable: the design itself requires that all schools shall be the same and that none shall be 'School'.
  • A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
  • Of all our institutions public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent upon the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment. Above all we must secure unity: we must be able to cast a whole generation in the same mould.
    • Napoleon Bonaparte, in an 1807 meeting of the Council of State. Quoted in "The Life and Memoirs of Count Molé", written by Mathieu Louis Molé, edited by the Marquis de Noailles. 2v London, 1923, 61.
  • "Therefore I praise New England because it is the country in the world where is the freest expenditure for education. ..., namely, that the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will: not alone in the elements, but, by further provision, in the languages, in sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The child shall be taken up by the State, and taught, at the public cost, the rudiments of knowledge, and, at last, the ripest results of art and science.
  • Success itself will decide whether the end of education, the [child's] usefullness [for the end of reason], has been attained. This is a manner of which the state is an extremely competent judge. Thus, if the state grants some office to the son, it thereby judges that his education is completed. Moreover, the judgement of the state binds the parents juridically; they ought to subordinate themselves to it for the sake of duty.
    • Johann Gottlieb Fichte - The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, 2005, Cambridge, p. 323.
  • When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."
    • Adolf Hitler, on Public Education, speech in November 6, 1933, William L. Shirer, The Rise of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 249.
  • There is a doctrine that is fundamental in American education. That is: every child born or adopted by this republic has by virtue of that fact the right to have developed whatever of talent he may possess, without reference to the quality, quantity, or type of that talent, under conditions favorable to such development, and that he shall have assured to him the oppurtunity to go as far as his ability and ambition will permit in order that he may live his life more abundantly than he otherwise could.
    • Claude L. Kulp, Ithaca High School Dedication Address, September 1960 (reprinted in The Ithaca Journal, September 26, 1960).
  • Dear rulers … I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school. … If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war, how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school, because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men.
    • Martin Luther, 1524, letter to the German rulers
    • quoted in The History of Compulsory Education in New England, John William Perrin, 1896.
  • In particular, at this point also urge governing authorities and parents to rule well and to send their children to school. Point out how they are obliged to do so and what a damnable sin they commit if they do not, for thereby, as the worst enemies of God and humanity, they overthrow and lay waste both the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world. Explain very clearly what kind of horrible damage they do when they do not help to train children as pastors, preachers, civil servants, etc., and tell them that God will punish them dreadfully for this. For in our day and age it is necessary to preach about these things. The extent to which parents and governing authorities are now sinning in these matters defies description. The devil, too, intends to do something horrible in all this.
    • Martin Luther, foreword to 'the small catechismus'
    • Preface.19-20, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., Fortress Press: Minneapolis, 2000.
  • Whoever has a right to hang has a right to educate.
  • Lycurgus," says Plutarch, "resolved the whole business of legislation into the bringing up of youth." When our legislators shall have learnt wisdom from the Spartan, they will acquire, as he acquired, the power of remoulding the national character.
    • Robert Owen, Tracts on Republican Government and National Education (1840), p. 14.
  • There shall be compulsory education, as the saying is, of all and sundry, as far this is possible; and the pupils shall be regarded as belonging to the state rather than to their parents.
  • I think this ... will demand, as a minimum condition, the establishment of a world State and the subsequent institution of a world-wide system of education designed to produce loyalty to the world State. No doubt such a system of education will entail, at any rate for a century or two, certain crudities which will militate agains the development of the individual. But if the alternative is chaos and the death of civilisation, the price will be worth paying.
  • Education, Public – "The single most important element in the maintenance of a democratic system"… "The better the citizenry as a whole are educated, the wider and more sensible public participation, debate and social mobility will be. Any serious rivalry from private education systems will siphon off Élites and thus fatally weaken both the drive and the financing of the state system. That a private system may be able to offer to a limited number of students the finest education in the world is irrelevant. Highly sophisticated Élites are the easiest and least original thing a society can produce. The most difficult and the most valuable is a well-educated populace."
    • John Ralston Saul, Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Penguin, 1995.
  • Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic revolutionary changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. That is my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
  • The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
    • Peter Medawar, "Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man". In: Mind Vol.70 (1961)

The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

  • To sum up the matter simply, in the language of educationists, one might say the responsibility of the schools of education for the present chaotic disorganization in the curricula of primary and secondary educational institutions is due to their hypertrophical complication of pedagogic education through the duplication of instructional materials under various divergent indefinite polysyllabic terminologies.
    • Portwell, B. G. (May 1940). "Mumbo Jumbo in Education". The American Mercury L (197): 429-432. Retrieved on 2011-06-28.
  • We are getting exactly what the school system was designed to produce - a uniformly dumbed down product of compliant, lackluster people who have had their individuality crushed out of them by a system that rewards mediocrity.
  • My school was a happy place. All of us who started our schooling there completed our studies till the eighth standard. I don't remember even a single person dropping out. These days, when i visit schools, both big and small, all across the country, i tell them that true quality does not come from a great building or great facilities or great advertisements. It happens when education is imparted with love by great teachers.
    • APJ Abdul Kalam, My Journey: Transforming Dreams into Actions, Rupa Publications, 2014.

Removed quotes[edit]

Education willlead us to victory.- Kervin Dela Pena


Education is what you learn, understand it better and you will learn MORE -John Lumagui 2k19

"Do noy chase success follow exellence and success will chaes you"- YUAN ALIM A student who studies well is a student who is preparing for his/her future - Chelsea alinas When choosing the right path, Education is the one. -Alfeiah Garcia 2k19

A fine student comes from the difficulties they overcome -Nicole Nacion 2k19

Knowledge comes everywhere from learning something. Knowledge can make you excellent.-James Go

Education is the key to the door of knowledge-Kreig Landrito

Education is the way to help our parents to success. Roger Balaclaot Jr.

education is a word to help your parents with your success in school-Mikaela Gonzalez

6A -Education -Ms. Marjorie Dela Providencia



Education is to know more knowledge -lance dollaga

Education is the only way to have freedom -Alexander Jimenez 2k19 Education will guide you to success. -Edniel Reyes Education is a simple way to had a nice future - Andrei Danes

Education is like Treasure,Cherish it like GOLD -Ashlee Galicia 2k19

Education is important because it helps us to learn and to have knowledge its important because education is the key for a better future -Ariana buenvenida

Education is the most common powerful weapon that can the world -Ranzelle Argueza

" Education is important. It teaches us a lot of lessons. Without this we don't know what to do. Thanks to the persons who teach us, we will have a better future." Khryztine D. Santiago

'be a good student but dont waste time to prove it' -Faye Frago 2k19

Education is the key to successBold text - Miss Marj

'eduction is the best way to learn king achilles

Education is like a key to freedom - Alan Joseph

It always seem possible until it's done -Paulyn Penafiel

Don't dream it,do it -Gwyneth Therese

Removed quotes which are misplaced, poorly formatted, and by non-notables. Markjoseph125 (talk) 05:33, 16 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

“The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late.”[edit]

Various sources are attributing this to Harold Eugene Edgerton, who does not have a page here yet. I have not found the precise source for it, so just taking a note here for the moment, so that we can consider whether and how to add it to pages on education, tricks or learning. Daniel Mietchen (talk) 21:32, 15 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]