Education Quotes

The only thing worse than losing hope is to be the reason someone else loses hope.

~ Tucker Elliot

Schooling will give you knowledge to make your living, but education is for living a life.

~ Debasish Mridha

The very least thing one should learn at the university is how to reach new knowledge.

~ Osman Doluca

I was only twelve. But I knew how much I loved her. It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that was no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school. All the long Autumn days of the years past when I carried her books home from school.

~ Ray Bradbury

Teachers who complain 'These kids have no work ethic' couldn't be farther off the mark. The problem is not that these kids lack a work ethic; the problem is that some of them see no connection between a work ethic and school. None of them would think, for example, to say to a customer at the MacDonald's drive-up window, 'Do you think I could get you those Chicken McNuggets some time tomorrow?' Yet we give sanction to that sort of request when it comes to school assignments.

~ Garret Keizer

An individual school can handle a resident idiot from time to time, but an entire school system is only as good as its weakest leader.

~ Tucker Elliot

Farid asked, 'Do American teachers care about every student?'I thought about a humanities teacher I’d worked with in Korea and more recently a science teacher I’d worked with in Germany. I said, 'I think most schools have a resident idiot.

~ Tucker Elliot

The ground for the necessity of Christian schools lies in this very thing, that no fact can be known unless it be known in its relationship to God. And once this point is clearly seen, the doubt as to the value of teaching arithmetic in Christian schools falls out of the picture. Of course arithmetic must be taught in a Christian school. It cannot be taught anywhere else.

~ Douglas Wilson

Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen of them, to give him an 87 percent. But we go far beyond this. A student writes an essay on a sunset, let us say, and the teacher writes 87 percent at the top of that paper. What he is saying, in effect, is that there is a mathematical metaphor operative here. The figure of 87 is to 100 what this submitted essay is . . . to what? What on earth is this supposed to mean?

~ Douglas Wilson

The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy.

~ Jacques Rancière

It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.

~ B.j. Novak

With homework, school prepares students for overtime. With reports, it prepares them for payday.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry?

~ Neel Burton

In a traditional classroom, the spread between the fastest and slowest students grows over time, [and so] putting them all in one class cohort eventually makes it exceedingly difficult to avoid either completely boring the fast students or completely losing the slow ones. Most school systems address this by... putting the fastest students in advanced or gifted class... and the slowest students into remedial classes. It seems logical... except for the fact that it creates a somewhat permanent intellectual and social division between students.

~ Salman Khan

Listening to the debates about public schools on the Christian Right, one hears plenty of opposing opinions and a great deal of confusion. Some want to change the schools, others want to leave them. But the smart money seems to know what it is doing. It provides support for programs like the Good News Club, which slowly erode the support for public education in the country at large and in their own constituency in particular. And then it lays the groundwork for dismantling public education in favor of a private system of religious education funded by the state.

~ Katherine Stewart

To be better equipped for the tests that the year will bring — read a textbook. To prepare for the tests that life will bring — read a book.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

School forces unique individuals to think, act, and, look alike.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

School overpopulates students’ minds with too much of what happened yesterday; seldom with what the students can do today, or, tomorrow.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.

~ Neil Postman

You don’t really need to be intelligent to be a 'top student.' All that you have to do is to forget the least in an exam.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organisation ... the editor of the NATIONAL CITIZEN will use all her influence of voice and pen against 'Sabbath Laws', the uses of the 'Bible in School', and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce 'God in the Constitution.

~ Matilda Joslyn Gage

I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

~ Amy Tan

I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188

~ Sonia Sotomayor

Your mission statement says Galer Street is based on global connectitude. (You people don't just think outside the box, you think outside the dictionary!)

~ Maria Semple

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.

~ Thomas Love Peacock

The child, unhampered, does not waste time.

~ Caroline Pratt

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

~ Diane Ravitch

I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.

~ Mark Twain

It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This education we're giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that's what makes it so painful. We're showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves.

~ Malcolm Bradbury

How can a school prepare you for murderers and mad-men?' Taro asked. 'Friends who would betray you to your death. People in authority who use their power to perform the most unnatural acts. People hating you because you can't do things you aren't supposed to be doing anyway. That's a lot to expect of a school.

~ Moira J. Moore

Always educate yourself regardless of how old you are.

~ Eraldo Banovac

Ultimately, what really matters is not just the experiences you have at a young age, but whether or not you are equipped-by your parents, by your genetics, by your education-to survive and deal with them.

~ Jenna Jameson

Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought. And now? Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths.How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for.

~ Aditya Chakrabortty

The promoters of emancipation were not bent on promoting a revolution so much as they were intent on snuffing one out – a backward-looking, aristocratic revolution – in order to put the South back on the track it should have been on from the beginning of the republic.

~ Allen C. Guelzo

Even if you think you are thinking and acting globally, there is always more to learn and know!

~ Auliq Ice

Mental illness is not something you misunderstand in this era. Get educated because bias is no different than racism.

~ Shannon L. Alder