"America's future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what he is taught; hence we must watch what we teach,and how we live."
-Jane Addams

"Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress,no crime can destroy,no enemy can alienate,no despotism can enslave. At home,a friend,abroad,an introduction,in solitude a solace and in society an ornament.It chastens vice,it guides virtue,it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it,what is man? A splendid slave,a reasoning savage."
-Joseph Addison

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination,as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
-Maya Angelou,"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," ch. 29,1969

"If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals."
-Susan B. Anthony

"The roots of education are bitter,but the fruit is sweet."
-Aristotle

Essentialists hope that when students leave school,they will possess not only basic skills and an extensive body of knowledge,but also disciplined,practical minds,capable of applying schoolhouse lessons in the real world.
-William C. Bagley

This is how it is today: The teachers are afraid of the principals. The principals are afraid of the superintendents. The superintendents are afraid of the board of education. The board is afraid of the parents. The parents are afraid of the children. The children are afraid of nothing!
-Milton Berle

[Milton] calls the university "A stony-hearted step-mother."
-Augustine Birrell,Obiter Dicta

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion,and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
-Allan Bloom

"Education is the movement from darkness to light."
-Allan Bloom

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.
-Roy Blount,Jr.

Education is a wonderful thing. If you couldn't sign your name you'd have to pay cash.
-Rita Mae Brown

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion,but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
-G. K. Chesterton

Changing a college curriculum is like moving a graveyard--you never know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them!
-Calvin Coolidge

"It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well."
-Rene Descartes

"For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive,constructive survey of actual needs,problems,and possibilities. Whatever value is possessed by the essay presented in this little volume resides in its attempt to call attention to the larger and deeper issues of Education so as to suggest their proper frame of reference."
-John Dewey,Experience and Education

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
-Will Durant

"Only the educated are free."
-Epictetus

"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 know and what you don't."
-Anatole France

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
-Robert Frost

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.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae,formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.
-John Gatto,Upon receiving the New York City Teacher of the Year Award,January 31,1990

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre."
-Gail Godwin

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

"No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy,the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure."
-Emma Goldman

"...[Federal aid] promotes the idea that federal school money is 'free' money,and thus gives the people a distorted picture of the cost of education. I was distressed to find that five out of six high school and junior college students recently interviewed in Phoenix said they favored federal aid because it would mean more money for local schools and ease the financial burden on Arizona taxpayers. The truth,of course,is that the federal government has no funds except those it extracts from the taxpayers who resided in the various States. The money that the federal government pays to State X for education has been taken from the citizens of State X in federal taxes and comes back to them,minus the Washington brokerage fee."
-Barry Goldwater,Conscience of a Conservative,1964

"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth which it prevents you from achieving."
-Russell Green

School is an institution for drilling children in cultural orientation. ...American classrooms,like educational institutions anywhere,express the values,preoccupations,and fears found in the culture as a whole. School has no choice; it must train the children to fit the culture as it is. ...Since education is always against some things and for others,it bears the burden of the cultural obessions. ...It thus comes about that most educational systems are imbued with anxiety and hostility,that they are against as many things as they are for. ... The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man,but to bind them...acquiescence,not originality. ...Schools are the central conserving force of the culture.
-Jules Henry,Culture Against Man,pp.283-287.,1963

No doubt to teach one's own children...takes special qualities. But these are qualities that many people have,or with a little help,can get. ...The home-schooling movement is full of such people,"ordinary" people doing things that they never would have thought they could do - learning the law,questioning the experts,holding their ground against arrogant and threatening authoritiues,defending themselves and their convictions... Seeing them,other ordinary people think they can do the same,and soon they do. This is why it may be a little misleading to speak of the homeschooling "movement." Most people think of a movement as something like an army,a few generals and a great many buck privates. In the movement for homeschooling,everyone is a general.
-John Holt,Teach Your Own (New York:Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence,1981) pp. 68-69.

Education – compulsory schooling,compulsory learning – is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can,any way they can.
-John Holt

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 man's training begins,it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
-Thomas Henry Huxley

When [the moral sense] is wanting,we endeavor to supply the defect by education,by appeals to reason and calculation,by presenting to the being so unhappily conformed,other motives to do good and to eschew evil,such as the love,or the hatred,or the rejection of those among whom he lives,and whose society is necessary to his happiness and even existence; demonstrations by sound calculation that honesty promotes interest in the long run; the rewards and penalties established by the laws; and ultimately the prospects of a future state of retribution for the evil as well as the good done while here. These are the correctives which are supplied by education,and which exercise the functions of the moralist,the preacher,and legislator; and they lead into a course of correct action all those whose depravity is not too profound to be eradicated.
-Thomas Jefferson,[to Thomas Law,1814]

The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity,smashing individualism,encouraging collectivism and compromise,destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry,twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority."
-Walter Karp

A child must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will to the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way through a dull routine of textbooks.
-Helen Keller

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. Our requirements for world leadership,our hopes for economic growth,and the demands of citizenship itself in an era such as this all require the maximum development of every young American's capacity. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy,Special Message to the Congress on Education,February 20,1961

"The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth."
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-John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each one of you is a fuse."
-Ed Koch

"The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread,leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees,so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now,especially in these free States,nearly all are educated--quite too nearly all,to leave the labor of the uneducated,in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise,education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain,in idleness,more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive."
-Abraham Lincoln,Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society,September 30,1859

If school success were a reliable index of human capacity,we should be able to go a step further and say that the intelligence test is a general measure of human capacity. But of course no such claim can be made for school success,for that would be to say that the purpose of the schools is to measure capacity. It is impossible to admit this. The child’s success with school work cannot be a measure of a child’s success in life. On the contrary,his success in life must be a significant measure of the school’s success in developing the capacities of the child. If a child fails in school and then fails in life,the school cannot sit back and say: you see how accurately I predicted this. Unless we are to admit that education is essentially impotent,we have to throw back the child’s failure at the school,and describe it as a failure not by the child but by the school.
-Walter Lippmann

"There is no virtue in being uncritical; nor is it a habit to which the young are given. But criticism is only the burying beetle that gets rid of what is dead,and,since the world lives by creative and constructive forces,and not by negation and destruction,it is better to grow up in the company of prophets than of critics."
-Richard Livingstone,On Education

It is impossible for us,with our limited means,to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons,Indian in blood and colour,but English in taste,in opinions,in morals,and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country,to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature,and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
[Macaulay's "minute on education" arguing for the use of English in India]
-Thomas Babington Macaulay

Education,then,beyond all other devices of human origin,is the great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
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-Horace Mann,Twelfth Annual Report of Horace Mann as Secretary of Massachusetts State Board of Education.(1848)

As we approach the new millennium,we see how much remains to be done to give our young and future generations a better world to live in: a more peaceful society with a healthier,cleaner environment and a pattern of sustainable development which seeks to eradicate poverty. Education is the single most powerful means to improve the quality of life... the single most powerful weapon against poverty and intolerance. Education builds a culture of peace ... it empowers human beings,both young and adult,to be effective in their chosen sphere of activity ... education in its essence,opens doors to both personal and social development.
-Federico Mayor,Address at the Second International Congress on Technical and Vocational Education Seoul,Republic of Korea,26 April 1999

"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."
-H. L. Mencken

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

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

Times have changed,and science has made great progress,and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed,and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems,among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity,only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.
-Maria Montessori,1948

The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that,while seated on the lavatory,waiting in doctors' surgeries,on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians,they may have something interesting to think about.
-Sir John Mortimer

Discussion in class,which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.
-Vladimir Nabokov

If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course,I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life,and its end is fitness for the world. It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand,nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other. Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors,of founders of schools,leaders of colonies,or conquerors of nations. It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons,of Napoleons or Washingtons,of Raphaels or Shakespeares,though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts. Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist,the economist or the engineer,though such too it includes within its scope. But a University training is the great ordinary means to an great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society,at cultivating the public mind,at purifying the national taste,at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration,at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age,at facilitating the exercise of political power,and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments,a truth in developing them,an eloquence in expressing them,and a force in urging them.
-John Henry Newman,Idea of a University,1852

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things,not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative,inventive and discoverers,who can be critical and verify,and not accept,everything they are offered.
-Jean Piaget,quoted in Education for Democracy,Proceedings from the Cambridge School Conference on Progressive Education

"Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood,and last to the very end of life."
-Plato

“My 12 years as a public school student where I keenly felt the inviting and disinviting signals sent to me by the schools,my years as a public school teacher in a wonderful school that taught me about the human side of teaching,and my role as a university professor at several major universities where I was mentored by world-class professors.”
-William W. Purkey

A Student is the most important person ever in this school...in person,on the telephone,or by mail.
A Student is not dependent on us...we are dependent on the Student.
A Student is not an interruption of our work..the Studenti s the purpose of it. We are not doing a favor by serving the Student...the Student is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
A Student is a person who brings us his or her desire to learn. It is our job to handle each Student in a manner which is beneficial to the Student and ourselves.
Adapted from an L.L. Bean Co. poster: "What is a customer?" by J. M. Eaten
-William W. Purkey,"What is a Student?"

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

"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education."
-Sir Walter Scott

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly,science into superstition,and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-George Bernard Shaw

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
-B. F. Skinner

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,The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ,Ch. 2

Education is a weapon,whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-Josef Stalin

"In the first place,God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."
-Mark Twain

All schools,all colleges,have two great functions: to confer,and to conceal,valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is,when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
-Mark Twain,notebook,1908

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
-Mark Twain,"attributed,unless verified,this quote should not be regarded as authentic."

I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously,and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing,but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the night. Thought is wonderful,but adventure is more wonderful still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia,and hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?
-Oscar Wilde,Intentions: The critic as artist,1890

If you consider what are called the virtues in mankind,you will find their growth is assisted by education and cultivation.
-Xenophon

"Education is not the filling of a pail,but the lighting of a fire."
-William Butler Yeats

"Education is the power to think clearly,the power to act well in the world's work,and the power to appreciate life."
-Brigham Young