more quotations and passages on education

The aim of education is the
knowledge not of fact,
but of values.

William R. Inge

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions
about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming
an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able
to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be educated.

Edith Hamilton

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even
how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between
what you do know and what you don’t.

Anatole France

Education is more than schooling. It is a cast of mind, a willingness to see the world with an endless sense of curiosity and wonder.
If you would be truly educated, you must adopt this cast of mind. You must open yourself to the richness of your everyday experience--to your own emotions, to the movements of the heavens and the languages of birds, to the privations and successes of people in other lands and other times, to the artistry in the hands of the mechanic and the typist and the child. There is no limit to the learning that appears before us. It is enough to fill us each day a thousand times over.

Kent Nerburn

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana

I've come to the frightening conclusion 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

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit
if you don't consider your students to be human beings.

Lou Ann Walker

No one who worships education has got the best out of
education. . . . Without a gentle contempt for education
no person's education is complete.

G.K. Chesterton

Real education must ultimately be limited to people
who insist on knowing; the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Ezra Pound

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

The word education comes from the Latin word educare, which means "to draw out." We do not teach our children the love of learning. We do not hold knowledge before them as a powerful tool for personal development. We don't produce broadly educated, well-rounded leaders for tomorrow. We teach more and more about less and less. We don't draw out the individual. We impose upon the individual--systems and structures. We don't reverence individuality, we don't treasure it, we stifle it and try to stamp it out. We don't educate, we formulate. We abandon the individual in his or her own need and uniqueness and "impose" the same upon all.

We provide an education in specialization. We produce clones for the modern world. We throw people into a mold, which we call an education system, to form cogs for the global economic wheel, all the time dangling the golden carrot before them as incentive and reason.

Truth be told, our modern education systems crush the very spirit they claim to instill.

Matthew Kelly

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

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always
turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading,
fictitious, mendacious--just dead wrong.

R. Baker

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Education is a progressive discovery
of our own ignorance.

Will Durant

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's
soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there,
and that is not what I call education. I call it intrusion.

Muriel Spark

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

Abbé Dimnet

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class,
because they do not realize how little they know.

William R. Inge

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

There is only one Education, and it has only one goal: the freedom of the mind. Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal. The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free. An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.

Richard Mitchell

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

Roger Lewin

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend
six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver.
Then they would really be educated.

Al McGuire

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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

If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study
the extremists, the obscure and "nutty." You need the balance! Your poor
brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four
hours a day, no matter what. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines
at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your
house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone
of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are
automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.

Ivan Stang

I do not much believe in education. Each person ought to be his or her
own model, however frightful that may be.

Albert Einstein

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

Mark Twain

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under
which name I include not merely things and their forces, but people
and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will
into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up
no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty
of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes
so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be
uninspired by the magic of sensitivity.

Norman Cousins

Our "life education" has not necessarily taught us a satisfying way
to live. We suffer from a vague sense that there must be something
more, some deeper meaning. We must return to kindergarten and
start to learn a way of life that is contrary to the way we approached
things before--a way of life based on trust of our own inner truth. We
can rediscover the child-like innocence and wisdom
that knows that anything is possible.

Shakti Gawain

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