Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in. That everyone may receive at least a moderate education appears to be an objective of vital importance.
– Abraham Lincoln
We do not know what education can do for us, because we have never tried it.
– Robert Hutchins
We have entered an age in which education is not just a luxury permitting some men an advantage over others. It has become a necessity without which a person is defenseless in this complex, industrialized society. ... We have truly entered the century of the educated man.
– Lyndon B. Johnson
We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education ... We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.
– E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart.
– Sir Walter Scott
What does education often do It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
– Henry David Thoreau
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented who are they to overtop their fellows And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.
– Clive Staples Lewis
What is defeat Nothing but education nothing but the first step to something better.
– Wendell Phillips
What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first step to something better.
What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.
– Felix G. Rohatyn
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.
– Joseph Addison
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
When will the public cease to insult the teacher's calling with empty flattery When will men who would never for a moment encourage their own sons to enter the work of the public schools cease to tell us that education is the greatest and noblest of all human callings
– William C. Bagley
Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
– Benjamin Disraeli
You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accomodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself-educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.
– Doris Lessing
You can buy education, but wisdom is a gift from God.
– Author Unknown
“Sure a boxer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; I once met a Headmaster called Meekin on a plane and he said:if boxers all owned doctorates then teachers would need to do a whole lot less fighting.”
– Héctor López
