A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
We are educated to associate virtue with submission to textual authorities, rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms.
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these gave only life, those the art of living well.
They were majoring in two subjects: physics and philosophy. Their choice amazed everybody but me: modern thinkers considered it unnecessary to perceive reality, and modern physicists considered it unnecessary to think. I knew better; what amazed me was that these children knew it, too.
Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effor of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favor of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes men to seek a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position... It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown mean and women. Among children it is very common, and grows naturally out of the period of make-believe and fancy. It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education... The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young. Education should not aim at passive awareness of dead facts, but at an activity directed towards the world that our effords are to create.
Education is a paradox: knowledge is power and can provide freedom on one hand, and on the other, I feel no greater bondage and burden than from that which I have learned in my schooling. Ignorance just may be bliss. Great psychological disturbances result from the knowledge of exactly how screwed up things are. History tells us that the wise typically suffer the most. I don't know any truly happy environmentalists, animal rights activists, or college-educated hippies. We complain to drown out our misery that is the result of what we've been exposed to. I think we would be happier if we never knew. But, after all, I do not regret the load which I am burdened with, only the fact that I do not possess coping skills sufficient enough to let me be at peace with the world..
"Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowlege of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future."
Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
[Blott said,] `But I look at these guys that've been here six, seven years, eight years, still suffering, hurt, beat up, so tired, just like I feel tired and suffer, I feel this, what, dread, this dread, I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead, and for what, for a chance at a like pro career that I'm starting to get this dready feeling a career in the Show means even more suffering, if I'm skeletally stressed from all the grueling here by the time I get there.'
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one. If you are asked what time it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
The Educated look down on the illiterate because they do not know the wonders of knowledge. The Uneducated look down on the illiterate becasue they have to deal with problems.
To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, THAT is to have been educated in the knowledge of simplicity.
There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
More is to be got from one teacher than from two books.
What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable, than that of teaching?
In the schoolhouse, we have the heart of the whole society.
A child's wisdom is also wisdom
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
The teacher, if indeed wise, does not bid you to enter the house of their wisdom, but leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect.
It is a most important point, you know, that the tutor must be dignified and at a distance from the pupil, and that the pupil should be as much as possible degraded. Otherwise, you know, they are not humble enough.
Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.
Never let school interfere with your education.
The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people--and this is true whether or not they are well-educated--is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations--in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.
The great trouble with most men is that those who have been educated become uneducated just as soon as they stop inquiring and investigating life and its problems for themselves.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
You must train the children to their studies in a playful manner, and without any air of constraint, with the further object of discerning more readily the natural bent of their respective characters.
In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, that is, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall see nothing, learn nothing, keep nothing.
One learns more from a good scholar in a rage than from a score of lucid and laborious drudges.
One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
Education is a sexual disease, IT makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you have the urge to pass it on.
I learn by going where I have to go.
I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
The great end in religious instruction, is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs; not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions, but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision; not to burden memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening...The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."
