Quotes about education

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

— Victor Hugo

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.

— Robert M. Hutchins

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

— Robert M. Hutchins

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.

— Robert M. Hutchins

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

— Aldous Huxley

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

— Aldous Huxley

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a person's training begins, it is probably the last lesson a person learns thoroughly.

— Thomas H. Huxley

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

— Thomas H. Huxley

The public school has become the established church of secular society.

— Ivan Illich

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.

— Michael Jackson

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

— Alice James

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

— Thomas Jefferson

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.

— Franz Kafka

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

— John F. Kennedy

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

— John F. Kennedy

Education is too important to be left solely to the educators.

— Francis Keppel

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

— Ellen Key

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

— Florence King

Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

— Karl Kraus

Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

— Karl Kraus

The regeneration of society is the regeneration of society by individual education.

— Jean De La Bruyere

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

— Timothy Leary

The education of a man is never complete until he dies.

— Robert E. Lee

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

— C. S. Lewis

Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.

— Andrew Linzey

No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.

— Walter Lippmann

The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.

— John Locke

A wise system of education will at last teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.

— Sir John Lubbock

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

— Martin Luther

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

— James Madison

Without education, you're not going anywhere in this world.

— Malcolm X

Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

— Horace Mann

Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

— Horace Mann

A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.

— Horace Mann

The aim of education should be to convert the mind into living fountain, and not a reservoir.

— John L. Mason

The system -- the American one, at least -- is a vast and noble experiment. It has been polestar and exemplar for other nations. But from kindergarten until she graduates from college the girl is treated in it exactly like her brothers. She studies the same subjects, becomes proficient at the same sports. Oh, it is a magnificent lore she learns, education for the mind beyond anything Jane Austen or Saint Theresa or even Mrs. Pankhurst ever dreamed. It is truly Utopian. But Utopia was never meant to exist on this disheveled planet.

— Phyllis Mcginley

The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.

— Marshall Mcluhan

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

— Alice Duer Miller

People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.

— Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk -- they are all part of the curriculum.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.

— Maria Montessori

The wretch who digs the mine for bread, or ploughs, that others may be fed, feels less fatigued than that decreed to him who cannot think or read.

— Hannah More

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

— Sir Claus Moser

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

— Camille Paglia

Education is not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the acquisition of wealth. It is an initiation into life of spirit, a training of the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.

— Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.

— Laurence J. Peter

The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

— Wendell Phillips

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 -- men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.

— Jean Piaget

The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery.

— Plato

Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

— Plato

Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.

— Plato

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

— Alexander Pope

Invest in yourself, in your education. There's nothing better.

— Sylvia Porter

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

— Ezra Pound

An effeminate education weakens both the mind and the body.

— Edgar Quinet

Formal education is but an incident in the lifetime of an individual. Most of us who have given the subject any study have come to realize that education is a continuous process ending only when ambition comes to a halt.

— R. I. Rees

Both class and race survive education, and neither should. What is education then? If it doesn't help a human being to recognize that humanity is humanity, what is it for? So you can make a bigger salary than other people?

— Beah Richards

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

— Carl Rogers

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

— Jim Rohn

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

— Theodore Roosevelt

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

— Theodore Roosevelt

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.

— Harold Rosenberg

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.

— Jean Jacques Rousseau

No one wants a good education. Everyone wants a good degree.

— Lee Rudolph

The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced.

— John Ruskin

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

— John Ruskin

The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.

— John Ruskin

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

— George Santayana

Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated.

— Robert C. Savage

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world.

— Felix E. Schelling

Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself.

— Friedrich Schlegel

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

— George Bernard Shaw

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

— B(urrhus) F(rederic) Skinner

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

— Lillian Smith

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men.

— Socrates

An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all

— Socrates

Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

— Joseph Stalin

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

— John Sterling

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

— James B. Stockdale

Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education --if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon --all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

— Anne Sullivan

It is only the ignorant who despise education.

— Publilius Syrus

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.

— Thomas Szasz

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

— Henry David Thoreau

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

— Henry David Thoreau

There is hardly a pioneer's hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

— Alexis De Tocqueville

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

— Mark Twain

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.

— Source Unknown

A college education never hurt anybody who was willing to learn after he got it.

— Source Unknown

The world is run by C students.

— Source Unknown

You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much.

— Source Unknown

Education has opened many, many doors. However, there are still innumerable doors shut tight -- unopened yet. These are the doors of the future. Perhaps one of my children will open one of these doors -- I shall help give him the key.

— Source Unknown

Education is not received. It is achieved.

— Source Unknown

Education is what you get from reading the fine print. Experience is what you get from not reading it.

— Source Unknown

I just graduated and already I'm way behind.

— Source Unknown

If nobody dropped out of eighth grade, who would hire the college graduates?

— Source Unknown