Quotes - old and new

Over the years many people have formed a view on schools and education (and use the words interchangeably). Whilst seeking knowledge, learning and growth are the essence of life, schools and the state system of education, are not always the same thing! Here are some quotes which may inspire or challenge.


"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality."
Beatrix Potter


What surprises home educators is that in an information-rich culture our educational institutions sometimes manage to block that basic desire to learn successfully.
John Randall, MP


I don't believe in the curriculum, I don't believe in grades, I don't believe in teacher-judged learning. I believe in children learning with our assistance and encouragement the things they want to learn, when they want to learn them, how they want to learn them, why they want to learn them. This is what, it seems to me, education must now be about.
John Holt (1923-1985)


Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962), English Social History (1942)


It is in the water, and only in the water, that you learn how to swim. Life is the same - it can't be learnt about in an institution set apart from real activity in a community.
Unknown


Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.
Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)


To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains.
Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole, 1938


Press on: nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge (1872 - 1933)


"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn"
Cicero


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


The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)


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


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 men.
Bill Beattie


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)


Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre but they are more deadly in the long run.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)


Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.
John Dewey 1859-1952


Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)


It is not what children are taught, but how they are treated, that determines the sort of adult they will become.
John Holt (1923-1985)


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 E. Wiggam


"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything learned in school"
Einstein


What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)


Society's institutions, like government, schools, the arts, and the media, corrupt naturally good individuals.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau


It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)


Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
Sir William Haley


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.
John W. Gardner (1912 - )


"To find yourself, think for yourself"
Socrates


Education is what you get from reading the fine print. Experience is what you get from not reading it.
Unknown


Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983)


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


A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.
Hugh Kingsmill


The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.
Zen Buddhist Text


I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught.
Sir Winston Churchill


The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler


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