Education Quotes

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” is credited to John Dewey, but the wording is a paraphrase. He expressed the idea in My Pedagogic Creed (1897) and Democracy and Education (1916) using other words, and the compressed version circulates as if it were a direct quotation. The Einstein line about education being what remains after you have forgotten what you learned in school is flagged as well.

The sourced entries are less tidy and better. Carlyle, in Sartor Resartus (1833), called it a tragedy that a man should die ignorant who had the capacity for knowledge. Bertrand Russell argued in Sceptical Essays (1928) that education had become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. Eric Hoffer, in Before the Sabbath (1979), wrote that the best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power.