School
divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable
length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial
care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the
simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.
Ivan Illich
The Founding
Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural
strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped
with tortures called an education. School is where you go between
when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
A school
is not a factory. Its raison d'être is to provide opportunity
for experience.
J. L. Carr
School-days,
I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence.
They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant
ordinances, brutal violations of common sense amd common decency.
It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that
most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one
really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
H. L. Mencken
No trace
of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man.
. . . No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the
memory.
Plato
The first
idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined,
is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task
of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound
good with immobility, and evil with activity.
Maria Montessori
My plan
of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on
week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I
allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics,
but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.
Hannah More
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's
fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans
are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational
education often has to be learned all over again after they leave
school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds
and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has
not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
Raymond Chandler
A teacher
should have maximal authority, and minimal power.
Thomas Szasz
We teachers
can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.
Maria Montessori
Train
up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will
not depart from it.
Proverbs
22:6
A teacher
affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry B.
Adams
There
is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence
of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
Allan Bloom
We schoolmasters
must temper discretion with deceit.
Evelyn Waugh
Education
is the art of making man ethical.
Georg Hegel
Once
more I would adopt the graver style- /A teacher should be sparing
of his smile.
William Cowper
It is
the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression
and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Life
is amazing: and the teacher had better prepare himself to be
a medium for that amazement.
Edward Blishen
The world
of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
Bertolt Brecht
Human
history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. Wells
What
office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires
more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable,
than that of teaching?
Harriet Martineau
It is
an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated
and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil
liberty or the capacity for self-government.
Texas Declaration
of Independence, 2 March 1836
The only
fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
John Locke
Education.
That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish
their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce
Arrogance,
pedantry, and dogmatism . . . the occupational diseases of those
who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.
Henry S.
Canby
How could
youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment
of living?
Henry David
Thoreau
Education
is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to
time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
What
sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to an human soul.
Joseph Addison
A schoolmaster
should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if
he was amazed at being himself.
Walter Bagehot
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
What
does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free,
meandering brook.
Henry David
Thoreau
Respect
the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
Ralph Waldo
Emerson
It is
very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in
a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
James Baldwin
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
The liberally
educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred
answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others
worthy of consideration.
Allan Bloom
It is
always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture
to instruct, even our friends.
C. C. Colton
I owe
everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept.
As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe
everything to this.
George Steiner
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