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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That is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust; to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind. I put forward this new idea: popular schooling should be placed under the control of the great workers’ unions. The problem of education is the most important class problem.

Antonio Gramsci Davidson's (1977)

If the end of education is to foster the love of truth, this love cannot be presupposed in the means. The means must rather be based on a resourceful pedagogical rhetoric that, knowing how initially resistant or impervious we all are to philosophic truth, necessarily makes use of motives other than love of truth and of techniques other than “saying exactly what you mean.” That is why, for example, the earlier, classical tradition of rationalism recognized the inescapable need to speak in philosophical poems and dialogues as well as treatises.

Arthur Melzer

These ceremonies and the National Statuary Hall will teach the youth of the land in succeeding generations as they come and go that the chief end of human effort in a sublunary view should be usefulness to mankind, and that all true fame which should be perpetuated by public pictures, statues, and monuments, is to be acquired only by noble deeds and high achievements and the establishment of a character founded upon the principles of truth, uprightness, and inflexible integrity.

Alexander H. Stephens