Quotations On Education

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Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. o

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Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. o

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John Dewey

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. o

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Oscar Wilde

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

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Petronius

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. o

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Thomas Jefferson

Education is a treasure. o

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John F. Kennedy

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day. o

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Chinese proverb

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain. o

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Albert Einstein

John Ralston Saul

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. o

Mohammed

Self-education and home education •

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. o

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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. o

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Mark Twain

Read, read, read. Do, do, do. o

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Mark Twain

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. o

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Epictetus

Louis L'Amour

The education of a man is never completed until he dies. o

Robert E. Lee

Raising children •

Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain. o

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It takes a whole village to raise a child. o

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John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704) Ashanti proverb

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. 1

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Theodore Roosevelt, American adventurer and U.S. president (1858-1919)

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. o

Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-American novelist and poet (1883-1931)

Goal of education •

Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man. o

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Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of real education. o

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Mohandas Gandhi, Indian nonviolent civil rights leader (1869-1948)

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. o

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William Haley

If we are to reach real peace in this world ... we shall have to begin with the children. o

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Hiram Powers, American sculptor (1805-1873)

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. o

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Plato, Greek philosopher (c. 428–c. 348)

Educate the heart. Let us have good men. o

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

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. o

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Swami Vivekananda

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. o

Robert Hutchins

Role models •

Children need models rather than critics. o

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A poor teacher complains, an average teacher explains, a good teacher teaches, a great teacher inspires. o

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Haim Ginott

The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children. o

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Robert Fulghum, American author (b. 1937)

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. o

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H. Narasimhaiah

Don't worry that children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you. o

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Joseph Joubert, French essayist (1752-1824)

Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.)

The question for the child is not 'Do I want to be good?' but 'Whom do I want to be like?' 2

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Example has more followers than reason. o

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Bruno Bettelheim, Austrian-American child psychologist, author (1903-1990) Christian Nevell Bovee, American author and lawyer (1820-1904)

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. o

John Lubbock (1834-1913)

Against education •

Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. o

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Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine. o

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Robert Lindner (1914-1956)

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. o

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H.L. Mencken

[Schools:] vast factories for the manufacture of robots. o

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Stephen R. Donaldson, author

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. o

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Jack Handey

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. o

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Victor Hugo

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. o

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Gertrude Stein, American writer (1874-1946)

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education. o

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Erich Fromm

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. o

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Henry Brooks Adams

Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines. o

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Irwin Edman

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. o

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G. M. Trevelyan

Malcolm Muggeridge; quoted in The Observer (1966)

School is practice for the future, and practice makes perfect, and nobody's perfect, so why practice? o

Billie Joe Armstrong

Against state education •

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week. o

Evan Esar, American humorist, 1899-1995 3

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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. o

Frank Zappa

For education For state education •

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. o

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Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. o

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William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education [2]

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. o

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Elwood Cubberly, 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. o

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Thomas Jefferson in an 1820 letter to William C. Jarvis

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. o

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Horace Mann

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. o

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George W. Bush, Santa Clara, California, May 1, 2002

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. o

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George W. Bush, Waco, Texas, August 13, 2002

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. o

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Omar N. Bradley, American general (1893-1981)

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. o

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Joseph Stalin

William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education, in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education [3]

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. o

Woodrow Wilson in a speech to businessmen 4

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