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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.

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Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that traveleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

Francis Bacon

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

William Godwin

The followers of Aristotle were called peripatetics because the "master of them that know" valued the linkage between cogitation and ambulation (the covered walk in Aristotle's Lyceum was a peripatos).

Stephen Jay Gould

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.

H. L. Mencken

In the distant past, in India as in many other countries, all recognized branches of learning had had a religious and philosophic bias. Education was not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the acquisition of wealth. It was an initiation into the life of spirit, a training of the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.

Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit The Evolution of India (1958)

How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart.

Louis Sullivan Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Teaching, as well as preaching, to which it is allied, is certainly a work belonging to the active life, but it derives in a way from the very fullness of contemplation

Étienne Gilson

Education is life—not a mere preparation for an unknown kind of future living. Consequently all static concepts of education which relegate the learning process to the period of youth are abandoned. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings.

Eduard C. Lindeman The Meaning of Adult Education (1926)

Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

Aldous Huxley Letters of Aldous Huxley (1969)

Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability [vs.] probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Fooled by Randomness (2001)

I hope we still have some bright twelve-year-olds who are interested in science. We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives on preparing for examinations.

Freeman Dyson

Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage,—a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier, in full military array.

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

With the proper understanding of the economic system, the workers will soon find means to end that system, and to raise on its ruins a development of society having for its goal the benefit of the whole, instead of a part, of the community.

William Earsman

Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups — that is the wisdom of teachers. Whoever merely tastes of his error, will keep house with it for a long time, ... but whoever drains it completely will have to get to know it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786)

The place-seeker will resort to methods from which self-respecting men would shrink with as much aversion as the ancient Jew shrank from contact with the leper. The true purpose of education is not office. "The true purpose of education," says one, "is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop to their fullest extent the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us." He, therefore, who fixes a limit of any kind to his intellectual attainments dwarfs himself, and cramps the growth of that mind given to us by the Creator, and capable of indefinite expansion.

William H. Crogman Talks for the Times (1896)

The more we do to ensure that all children have similar cognitively stimulating early childhood experiences, the less we will have to worry about failing schools. This in turn will enable us to let our schools focus on teaching the skills — how to solve complex problems, how to think critically and how to collaborate — essential to a growing economy and a lively democracy.

Sean Reardon

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.

John Adams

Give the children of the poor that portion of education which will enable them to know their own resources ; which will cultivate in them an onward-looking hope, and give them rational amusement in their leisure hours : this, and this only, will work out that moral revolution, which is the legislator's noblest purpose.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Thomas Jefferson

Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves... Aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish.

Helena Blavatsky The Key to Theosophy (1889)

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