Quotations about Education

No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.  ~G.K. Chesterton


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


The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris


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


The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt


It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.  ~Author unknown, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, Ronald D. Fuchs, ed.


An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.  ~Author Unknown


If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.  ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok


It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.  ~Robert G. Ingersoll


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


To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.  ~A.A. Milne


Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education.  Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization.  We must make our choice; we cannot have both.  ~Abraham Flexner


Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.  ~Edward Everett


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


Education should be exercise; it has become massage.  ~Martin H. Fischer


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


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


Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.  What you gain at one end you lose at the other.  It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.  It won't fatten the dog.  ~Mark Twain


My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.  ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


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


Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?  ~Erich Fromm


Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge.  Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs.  ~Martin H. Fischer


Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.  ~William Haley


I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice.  That's what I call a liberal education.  ~Tallulah Bankhead


A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.  ~George Santayana


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


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.  ~R. Baker


What does education often do?  It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890


Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use?  It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that.  All we need to do is start the war on education.  If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics.  ~Leighann Lord


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


If I had learned education I would not have had time to learn anything else.  ~Cornelius Vanderbilt


Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.  ~Aristotle


Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.  ~G.K. Chesterton


In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.  ~Michel de Montaigne


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


Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.  ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928


Learning, n.  The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.  ~William R. Inge


It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.  ~Aristotle


I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.  ~Mark Twain


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


If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university.  You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.  ~Desmond Bagley


Education is the movement from darkness to light.  ~Allan Bloom


Much education today is monumentally ineffective.  All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.  ~John W. Gardner


There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.  ~Will Rogers


Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.  ~William Butler Yeats


Education, n.  That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.  ~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary


A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.  ~Martin H. Fischer


With just enough learning to misquote.  ~George Gordon, Lord Byron, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"


There is only one Education, and it has only one goal:  the freedom of the mind.  Anything that needs an adjective, be it civics education, or socialist education, or Christian education, or whatever-you-like education, is not education, and it has some different goal.  The very existence of modified "educations" is testimony to the fact that their proponents cannot bring about what they want in a mind that is free.  An "education" that cannot do its work in a free mind, and so must "teach" by homily and precept in the service of these feelings and attitudes and beliefs rather than those, is pure and unmistakable tyranny.  ~Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, September 1982


The regular course was Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with; and then the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.  ~Lewis Carroll


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


They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation.  What they mean is that we go to school longer.  It is not the same thing.  ~Richard Yates


I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver.  Then they would really be educated.  ~Al McGuire


The tragedy of education is played in two scenes - incompetent pupils facing competent teachers and incompetent teachers facing competent pupils.  ~Martin H. Fischer


A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it.  ~Brander Matthews


If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found time to conquer the world.  ~Heinrich Heine


You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


One attraction of Latin is that you can immerse yourself in the poems of Horace and Catullus without fretting over how to say, "Have a nice day."  ~Peter Brodie


The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.  ~Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 1883


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


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


Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.  ~Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents


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


Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throats.  ~Martin H. Fischer


It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it.  ~Finley Peter Dunne


Do you know the difference between education and experience?  Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.  ~Pete Seeger


We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


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 Edward Wiggam


The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.  ~George Santayana


The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education.  School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.  ~John Updike, The Centaur, 1963


You can get all A's and still flunk life.  ~Walker Percy


The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living.  That's one thing about a little education.  It spoils you for actual work.  The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.  ~Will Rogers


My parents told me, "Finish your dinner.  People in China and India are starving."  I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework.  People in India and China are starving for your job."  ~Thomas L. Friedman


All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.  ~George Eliot


Education is the transmission of civilization.  ~Ariel and Will Durant


The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.  ~Bishop Mandell Creighton


If you sincerely desire a truly well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty."  You need the balance!  Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, no matter what.  Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.  ~Ivan Stang, High Weirdness By Mail