Education Quotes And Ideas

Before I get back to journal posts, perhaps we need some expert quotes about the formal education question. Actually the first and the last quote may be enough ...

The desire to know is natural to good men. — Leonardo da Vinci

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself. — Leonardo da Vinci

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. — Eric Hoffer

I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: 'Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?'" — Leonardo da Vinci

The philosophy in the classroom of this generation is the philosophy of government in the next. — Abraham Lincoln

I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves. — Harriet Tubman

The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent. — John Dewey

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. — Mark Twain

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions. — William Godwin

In summary, the present survey of biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in the intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of fantasy as a reaction to the preceding conditions. It might be remarked that the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three factors to a minimum: accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius. — Harold Grier McCurdy

Every child is born a genius. 9,999 out of every 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently, de-geniused by grown-ups. — R. Buckminster Fuller

The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind. — Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr

To be nobody but yourself — in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. — e.e. cummings

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. — John Kenneth Galbraith

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. — Thomas Jefferson

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature. — Benjamin Franklin

In the eighteenth century it was not common to suggest that slavery was a sin against fellow human beings. In the nineteenth century it was not common to suggest that women deserved the same privileges of citizenship as men. In the twentieth century it is not common to suggest that children can learn without attending schools. All three are examples of how the cultural attitudes of a population influence not only their view of reality, but also create social structures that reinforce and perpetuate those views. Science, medicine, and law were used to keep slaves and women in their place until cultural attitudes towards these people changed; likewise, I think, we are in the midst of a gradual change in our perception of children. — Patrick Farenga

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. — E. M. Forster

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. — Margaret Mead

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. — Ludwig von Mises

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

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas. — Agatha Christie

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself , instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he builds a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences. — Anne Sullivan

People who make careers out of helping others - sometimes at great sacrifice, often not - usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help. - John Holt

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