Distinctive Thoughts on Education

“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

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

“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

“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 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

“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

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.”
~Oscar Wilde

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

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

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

“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