Quotes on Education

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship.

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation.

A republican government in a hundred points is weaker than an autocratic government; but in this one point it is the strongest that ever existed — it has educated a race of men that are men.

Modern education is premised strongly on materialistic values. It is vital that when educating our children's brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts, a key element of which has to be the nurturing of our compassionate nature.

He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.

No player in the NBA was born wanting to play basketball. The desire to play ball or to read must be planted. The last 25 years of research show that reading aloud to a child is the oldest, cheapest and must successful method of instilling that desire. Shooting baskets with a child creates a basketball player; reading to a child creates a reader.

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

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.

An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation.

Lessons, however, that enter the soul against its will never grow roots and will never be preserved inside it.

The only real ill-doing is the deprivation of knowledge.

Man is never so authentically himself as when at play.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

Education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

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.

When we find ourselves unable to reason (as one often does when presented with, say, a problem in algebra) it is because our imagination is not touched. One can begin to reason only when a clear picture has been formed in the imagination. Bad teaching is teaching which presents an endless procession of meaningless signs, words and rules, and fails to arouse the imagination.