Education Quotes

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A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation?"
Doris Lessing

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt

An educated people can be easily governed.
Frederick The Great

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.
Russell Baker

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

As everybody knows, money is getting very short in Britain, university departments are closing, all kinds of studies are being cut. This type of a science has been badly affected, often the first to be cut -- yet I have just read that in various universities, departments studying psychology, social science and so forth have been reprieved, because of their usefulness to industry. In other words, they are proving their value where it counts.
Doris Lessing /Prisons We Choose to Live Inside/

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture.
Doris Lessing

Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Doris Lessing

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
Clifford Stoll

Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
Mark Twain

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
Mark Twain

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

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

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
Daniel J. Boorstin

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

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

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Albert Einstein

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.
George Savile, Lord Halifax

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

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm Forbes

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

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Confucius

I pay the schoolmaster but 'tis the schoolboys who educate my son.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Michel de Montaigne

I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
Wilson Mizner

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
Doris Lessing /The Golden Notebook/

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of ten years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.
Confucius

Imagine us saying to children: "In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these rules calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions."
Doris Lessing

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
Albert Einstein

It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them?
Doris Lessing

Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
Doris Lessing

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Isaac Asimov

The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values.
Dean William R. Inge

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
William S. Burroughs

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.
Rabindranath Tagore

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
Alvin Toffler

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
Thomas Jefferson

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Ernest Renan

There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.
John Adams

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.
George S. Patton

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
Bertrand Russell

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
Galileo Galilei

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.
Peter Drucker

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
Gilbert K. Chesterton