About six months ago I put together a post with almost three dozen of my favorite quotes about education. Of course, that was barely scratching the surface on such wonderful quotes.
I’ve decided that this week is another good week for such a list. (I just returned from Texas, I’m trying to finish editing one novel and start editing a second one, all while doing a variety of planning for a major trip next fall, and two different family reunions. So “free time” has been rather limited of late!)
So, this week I’m again going to “cheat” and use some great words from other people. You will certainly see my attitude towards education when you read these quotes. And again, even if you don’t agree with every one of them, I hope they cause you to think!
- “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)
- “I learned most, not from those who taught me, but from those who talked with me.” Augustine (354 – 430 AD)
- “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” Erasmus (1466 – 1536)
- “The only thing more expensive than education is ignorance.” Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)
- “All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.” Sir Walter Scott (1771 – 1832)
- “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
- “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
- “One you learn to read you will be forever free.” Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895)
- “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841 – 1935)
- “Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.” Charlotte Mason (1842 – 1923)
- “Do not let the endless succession of small things crowd great ideals out of sight and mind.” Charlotte Mason (1842 – 1923)
- “I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.” Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931)
- “Education is an admirable thing, but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
- “Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.” William Howard Taft (1857 – 1930)
- “Thank goodness I was never sent to school: it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943)
- “It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was.” Maria Montessori (1870 – 1952)
- “Education is the period during which you are being instructed by someone you don’t know, about something you do not want to know.” K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)
- “Schools have not necessarily much to do with education…they are mainly institutions of control where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965)
- “I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
- “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
- “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by the way it climbs a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
- “Play is the highest form of research.” Albert Einstein (1879 -1955)
- “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 (1890 – 1976)
- “The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.” Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980)
- “The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.” S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)
- “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Seuss (1904 – 1991)
- “When we make our laws and educational policies primarily for the parents who don’t care, instead of for those who do, those laws are backwards. We urge the burden of proof be on the state to show which mothers and fathers are not doing their job.” Raymond Moore (1916 – 2007)
- “Education is the most powerful weapon for changing the world.” Nelson Mandella (1918 – 2013)
- “What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools, but that it isn’t a school at all.” John Holt (1923 – 1985)
- “Ask questions to find out something about the world itself, not to find out whether or not someone knows it.” John Holt (1923 – 1985)
- “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But, for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” Fred Rogers (1928 – 2003)
- “When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.” John Taylor Gatto (1935 – )
- “I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools any time soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what’s rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the institution ‘schools’ very well, but it does not ‘educate,’ that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It’s just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing.” John Taylor Gatto (1935 – )
- “Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.” John Taylor Gatto (1935 – )
- “Education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed. The key is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to built achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” Sir Ken Robinson (1950 – )
Happy learning!
Cathy
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