quotations and passages on education

Education does not mean teaching people to
know what they do not know; it means teaching
them to behave as they do not behave.

John Ruskin

The biggest dilemma in education today is the differing visions
of what an educated person means. To do well on tests
is often more important than helping young people really
be prepared to deal with the tests of life.

Linda Lantieri

You know that I don't believe
that anyone has ever taught
anything to anyone. I question
the efficacy of teaching. The
only thing that I know is
that anyone who wants to
learn will learn. And maybe
a teacher is a facilitator,
a person who puts things
down and shows people
how exciting and wonderful
it is and asks them to eat.

Carl Rogers

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how
to think, than what to think - rather to improve
our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves,
than to load the memory with thoughts of other people.

Bill Beattie

We are failing in schools of education because we're not helping teachers to shed
the role of teachers and become human beings and to realize that they are guides.
To the extent to which they recognize this, so will they be successful in the classroom
because a kid can recognize a guide. . . . Imagine what it would be like if everyone
in this room had the opportunity to be encouraged to be a unique human being. But you
know how it seems to me? That the essence of our educational system is to make
everybody like everybody else. And when we've done that, we consider ourselves
very lucky, indeed. You see it happening all the time! "I'm not interested in your
uniqueness. I'm interested in knowing if I have succeeded in giving you me, and
to the extent to which you can parrot me, I have been a successful teacher."

Leo Buscaglia

I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way.
I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you.

George Bernard Shaw

Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we
remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to
be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting,
but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic
needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems
boredom really is. Research has shown that boredom is closely related to
frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability,
withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show.

Fritz Redl

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John Dewey

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving
your community and world better than you found it.

Marian Wright Edelman

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not
to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them
to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves.

Robert Hutchins

It can be tempting to blame others for
our loss of direction. We get lots of information about
life but little education in life from parents, teachers,
and other authority figures who should know better from
their experience. Information is about facts. Education is about
wisdom and the knowledge of how to love and survive.

Bernie Siegel

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate
any plan or system respecting it, I can only say
that I view it as the most important subject which
we as a people may be engaged in.

Abraham Lincoln

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 how we could tolerated anything so primitive.

John W. Gardner

Education is a companion which no future can depress, no crime
can destroy, no enemy can alienate it and no nepotism can enslave.

Ropo Oguntimehin

More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself,
is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what
is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build
a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

Jonathan Kozol

HOME - contents
abundance - acceptance - achievement - action - adversity - aging - anticipation - appreciation - attitude - authenticity
awareness - balance - beauty - being yourself - beliefs - body - character - children - Christianity - coincidence
commitment - common sense - community - compassion - compliments - compromise - confidence - conscience
contentment - courage - creativity - death - determination - earth - ego - encouragement - enthusiasm - eternity
faith - family - flowers - forgiveness - freedom - friendship - fun - gardening - gentleness - giving - God - goodness
grace - gratitude -growing up - happiness - healing - helpfulness - home - hope - humility - imagination
integrity - joy - kindness - laughter - learning - letting go - life - listening - love - marriage - miracles - mystery
nature - now - open-mindedness - opportunity - optimism - patience - peace - perseverance - perspective
play - prayer - principle - purpose - religion - rest - role models - sadness - self - self-respect - serving others - silence
simplicity - spirit - success - time - today - truth - values - war - wisdom - wonder - work - worship
spring - summer - fall - winter - Christmas - Thanksgiving - New Year - zen sayings
obstacles to living life fully - e-zine archives - quotations contents
You can help to support this site!

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was
to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl
should know how much they do not know,
and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

William Haley

This is about helping children become themselves. What is a school if it isn't helping people
find what they want to do? I don't just mean careers. I mean teaching how to sing, dance,
paint, act, write poetry, play tennis, play the guitar. We'd be a better, more harmonious
society if people had these interests developed when they were young. But they don't.
That's a cause of depression. And the things I'm talking about: children need them here
[in school], but the more deprived the background, the less the infrastructure at home,
the greater the need. If schools aren't going to do these things, who is?

Anthony Seldon

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.

Joseph Campbell

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

W. B. Yeats

Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts,
skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making
visible what is hidden as a seed. . . To be educated, a person doesn't
have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have
been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged
human life. . . One of the greatest problems of our time is that many
are schooled but few are educated.

Thomas Moore

I've come to the frightening conclusioin that I am the decisive element
in the classroom. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a
teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable
or joyous. I can be a 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.

Haim Ginott

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to
make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done,
whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to
be learned; and however early a person’s training begins,
it is probably the last lesson he or she learns thoroughly.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The aim of education should not be to teach how to use
human energies to improve the environment, for we are
finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of
education is the development of the human personality,
and that in this regard education is of immediate
importance for the salvation of mankind.

Maria Montessori

Education should never work against a person's
destiny, but should achieve the full development
of his or her own dispositions. The education of
people today so often lags behind the talents and
tendencies which their destinies have implanted in
them. We must keep pace with these powers to such
an extent that the human beings in our care can win
their way through to all that their destinies will
allow--to the fullest clarity of thought, the most loving
deepening of their feeling, and the greatest possible
energy and ability of will. This can only be done
by an art of education and teaching which is based
on a real knowledge of people.

Rudolf Steiner

It is through education that all the good in the world arises.

Immanuel Kant