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Top 10 EDUCATION QUOTES

10
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
Mark Twain

9
Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
Napoleon Hill

8
The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.
William Ralph Inge

7
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Albert Einstein

6
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
Aristotle

5
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

4
Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.
Anthony J. D'Angelo

3
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Benjamin Franklin
2
Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X

1
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela

https://www.brainyquote.com/lists/topics/top_10_education_quotes

Education Quotes and Sayings about Teaching, Learning, Teachers and


Students

Dr. Bob Kizlik


ADPRIMA.COM

Updated January 25, 2018

It's hardly a secret, but there are thousands of web pages that have quotations or sayings about
education. Quotes are everywhere. It's no stretch to say that almost everyone appreciates good quotes
and sayings, especially ones that convey an important idea. Often, a short quote or saying reflects
wisdom, and can have a more profound impact than ten pages of tortured prose, or even some pictures.
Below are some of the best I've seen, including the famous "I Taught Them All" and "The Poor Scholar's
Soliloquy," both of which are more than 50 years old. Please forgive of bit of self-aggrandizement, as I
have included a few of my own sayings.

“Learning, regardless of how it is defined, is ultimately the responsibility of the learner,


not the teacher.” Bob Kizlik

The bad teacher's words fall on his pupils like harsh rain; the good teacher's, as gently as dew. Talmud:
Ta'anith 7b

Education is like a double-edged sword. It may be turned to dangerous uses if it is not properly handled.
Wu Ting-Fang

What people need and what they want may be very different.... Teachers are those who educate the
people to appreciate the things they need. Elbert Hubbard

Truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but, in the end, there it is. Sir
Winston Churchill

Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy. Robert Heinlein
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will
be judged with greater strictness. James 3:1

“One learns how to teach and get better at it by actually teaching, analyzing results, and
using feedback to improve. Teacher education programs do not teach people how to
teach; at best, they prepare students to learn the needed professional skills once they
begin teaching.” Bob Kizlik

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have
to settle for something less. Lee Iacocca

I am a teacher! What I do and say are being absorbed by young minds who will echo these
images across the ages. My lessons will be immortal, affecting people yet unborn, people I will
never see or know. The future of the world is in my classroom today, a future with the potential
for good or bad. The pliable minds of tomorrow's leaders will be molded either artistically or
grotesquely by what I do.

Several future presidents are learning from me today; so are the great writers of the next
decades, and so are all the so-called ordinary people who will make the decisions in a
democracy. I must never forget these same young people could be the thieves or murderers of
the future.

Only a teacher? Thank God I have a calling to the greatest profession of all! I must be vigilant
every day lest I lose one fragile opportunity to improve tomorrow. Ivan Welton Fitzwater

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt
for education, no man's education is complete. G. K. Chesterton

If you say you understand something, then you can explain what you understand to others.
Anything short of that is deception, not understanding. Education, above all, should not be about
fostering deception. In the same vein, anything not understood in more than one way is not
understood at all. R. J. Kizlik

Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don't just stand
there, make it happen. Lee Iacocca

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance. Sir Claude Moser

Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more. Bob Talbert

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour


falls from the sky a meteoric shower of facts;
They lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
is daily spun,
But there exists no loom
to weave it into fabric.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Huntsman, What Quarry?" 1939

Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation and social
standing, never can bring about a reform. Susan B. Anthony

Three things give the student the possibility of surpassing his teacher: ask a lot of
questions, remember the answers, teach. Jan Amos Coménius

Everything depends upon the quality of experience . . . just as no man lives or dies to
himself, so no experience lives and dies to itself.

Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth
of further experience.

The central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of
present experience that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences. John
Dewey, 1938

When I think about all the crap


I learned in high school . . .
. . . . . it's a wonder I can think at all. Paul Simon

Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place
so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it. Soren
Kierkegaard

The desire to know is far more important than achievement and/or performance
measures. Caine & Caine

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein 1940

The teacher is one who made two ideas grow where only one grew before. Elbert
Hubbard

Learning is something students do, NOT something done to students. Alfie Kohn

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not
yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from
stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin
without fail. Albert Einstein

Education, properly understood, is that which teaches discernment. Joseph Roux

Courses in education given at...teachers' colleges have traditionally been used as a


substitute for genuine scholarship. In my opinion, much of the so-called science of
"education" was invented as a necessary mechanism for enabling semi-educated people
to act as tolerable teachers. Sloan Wilson
I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could
smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of . . . individualism, conquest and
exploitation . . . A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles,
is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is
considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free
human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. Helen Keller

If the student-written text is to go beyond the stories about generals and millionaires and
queens and kings, teachers have to help their students, in one way or other, to discover
and record the voices of the common men and women who reflect the real life out of
which all history is made. This is especially the case in writing about minorities, as well
as about women.

Our tendency is to attempt to make up for the errors of the past by listing (and praising)
as many notable blacks, or women, as we can possibly "collect"--in order, it seems, to
struggle back in kind against all of those white male Anglo-Saxon figures who now
dominate the school curricula.

We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of


grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.
Jonathon Kozol On Being a Teacher

I Taught Them All

I have taught high school for 10 years. During that time, I have given assignments,
among others, to a murderer, an evangelist, a pugilist, a thief, and an imbecile.

The murderer was a quiet little boy who sat on the front seat and regarded me with pale
blue eyes; the evangelist, easily the most popular boy in school, had the lead in the
junior play; the pugilist lounged by the window and let loose at intervals a raucous laugh
that startled even the geraniums; the thief was a gay-hearted Lothario with a song on his
lips; and the imbecile, a soft-eyed little animal seeking the shadows.

The murderer awaits death in the state penitentiary; the evangelist has lain a year now in
the village churchyard; the pugilist lost an eye in a brawl in Hong Kong; the thief, by
standing on tiptoe, can see the windows of my room from the county jail; and the once
gentle-eyed little moron beats his head against a padded wall in the state asylum.

All of these pupils once sat in my room, sat and looked at me gravely across worn brown
desks. I must have been a great help to those pupils--I taught them the rhyming scheme
of the Elizabethan sonnet and how to diagram a complex sentence. Naomi White 1937

"Insight into soul-action, ability to discriminate the genuine from the sham and capacity
to further one and discourage the other." John Dewey

I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom.
It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the
weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a student's life miserable or
joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor,
hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be
escalated or de-escalated and a student humanized or de-humanized. Hiam Ginott

The "Hidden Curriculum"

•The teacher "teaches" and the students "sit and listen" or learn passively.
•There is one "right answer" to any question, and it is in the book to be read.
•The answer to most questions can be given in one or two words, and no one will
challenge you to go deeper.
•Books and teachers are always "right", and we learn only from them, not from any other
resource in the room, such as our friends.
•If we wait long enough, a teacher will answer her own question, so we won't have to do
much work.
•The teacher is the only one worth listening to.
•If we ask enough questions about a difficult assignment, we can get the teacher to make
it easier and less demanding.
•"Thinking" is not something we talk about.
•If I memorize enough stuff, I can get a good grade.
•Most tasks and tests will demand recall of isolated pieces of information, and I will not
have to show how concepts and ideas are related or how facts illustrate underlying
principles. Barrell (1991)

To say that you have taught when students haven't learned is to say you have sold when
no one has bought. But how can you know that students have learned without spending
hours correcting tests and papers? . . . check students understanding while you are
teaching (not at 10 o'clock at night when you're correcting papers) so you don't move on
with unlearned material that can accumulate like a snowball and eventually engulf the
student in confusion and despair. Madeline Hunter, 1989

Only through education does one come to be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and
only through teaching others does one come to realize the uncomfortable inadequacy of
his knowledge. Being dissatisfied with his own knowledge, one then realizes that the
trouble lies with himself, and realizing the uncomfortable inadequacy of his knowledge
one then feels stimulated to improve himself. Therefore, it is said, "the processes of
teaching and learning stimulate one another." Confucius, circa 500 BCE

I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a
good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult. E. B. White

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your
life, but in a new way. Doris Lessing

Pick Battles big enough to matter, small enough to win Jonathon Kozol
What Teacher Education Programs forget to tell their candidates:
•A teacher cannot be all things to all people
•You are not a "bad person" if you are not always able to meet all the needs of all your
students
•You are a powerful and compelling figure in the lives of your students
•In recalling their school years, students mostly remember their teachers, and not the
courses they took
•You need to find a "critical friend" whom you can trust to serve as a sounding board
•At times students can be very cruel, difficult, and mean-spirited
•It is a mistake to personalize a student's unacceptable behavior
•Teachers love their students as their parents love them--but in a different way and for a
different reason
•Few people will ever appreciate the amount of time and effort teachers give to their
teaching
•By choosing to be a teacher, you have entered an emotionally dangerous profession
•You are both a role model and change agent
•You need to pay attention to both your physical and emotional well-being
•Teaching is not like inducing a chemical reaction, but more like creating a painting, or
planting a garden, or writing a friendly letter.
•Teaching is a complicated business because students are such unexpected blends of
character, personality, and background
•Most of the significant advances in civilization have been the result of the work of
teachers
•Teaching is an act of faith in the promise of the future
•Teaching is a way of life
James Marran, Social Studies Dept. Chair
New Trier High School, Winnetka, Ill.

TEACHNG AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY

By Postman & Weingartner

1. Declare a five-year moratorium on the use of all textbooks


2. Have “English” teachers “teach” Math, Math teachers English, Social Studies
teachers science, Science teachers Art, and so on.
3. Transfer all elementary teachers to high school and vice versa.
4. Require every teacher who thinks he knows his “subject” well to write a book on it.
5. Dissolve all “subjects”, “courses”, and “course requirements”.
6. Limit each teacher to three declarative sentences per class, and 15 interrogatives.
7. Prohibit teachers from asking any questions they already know the answers to.
8. Declare a moratorium on all tests and grades.
9. Require all teachers to undergo some form of psychotherapy as part of their in-
service training
10. Classify teachers according to their ability and make the lists public.
11. Require all teachers to take a test prepared by students on what the students know.
12. Make every class an elective and withhold a teacher's monthly check if his students
do not show any interest in going to next month's classes.
13. Require every teacher to take a one-year leave of absence every fourth year to
work in some other “field” other than education.
14. Require each teacher to provide some sort of evidence that he or she has had a
loving relationship with at least one other human being.
15. Require that all the graffiti accumulated in the school toilets be reproduced on large
paper and be hung in the school hals.

16. There should be a general prohibitiion against the following owrds and phrases:
syllabus, ciovering ground, I.Q., makeup test, disadvantaged, gifted, accelerated,
enhancement., course, grade, score, human nature, dumb, college material and
administrative necessity.

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Great Educational Quotes


Below are quotes we're collecting to use the "wisdom of the ages" to think deeply about
learning. If you have a favorite learning quote you'd like to contribute, email it to
admin@web20labs.com--or, like our great friend Peggy George did, you can even email us
your whole collection!

Human beings are curious by nature.


- Aristotle

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with
diligence.
- Abigail Adams

Upon the subject of education ... I can only say that I view it as the most important subject
which we as a people may be engaged in.
- Abraham Lincoln

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
- Abraham Lincoln

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged
for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
- Agatha Christie

It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind as it is impossible to force


it upon the unreasoning.
- Agnes Repplierg

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
- Albert Einstein
Curiosity is a delicate little plant that, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of
freedom.
- Albert Einstein

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- Albert Einstein

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole
life believing that it is stupid.
- Albert Einstein

Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.


- Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
- Albert Einstein

I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
- Albert Einstein

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.


- Albert Einstein

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet
entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from
stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without
fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be
promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
- Albert Einstein

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
- Albert Einstein

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a
hard duty.
- Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning.


- Albert Einstein

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.


- Albert Einstein

Play is the highest form of research.


- Albert Einstein
Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
- Albert Schweitzer

The best teachers are those that show you where to look but don't tell you what to see.
- Alexandra K. Trenfor

The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.
- Alexandra K.Trenfor

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
- Amos Bronson Alcott

The freedom to make mistakes provides the best environment for creativity. Education isn't
how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to
differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
- Anatole Franc

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.


- Anatole France

I've learned... that the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.
- Andy Rooney

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me
to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to
think.
- Anne Sullivan

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their
growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about
things.
- Anne Sullivan

People seldom see the halting and painful steps at which the most insignificant success is
achieved.
- Anne Sullivan

Learning is not a spectator sport.


- Anonymous

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot
wrong questions.
- Anthony Jay

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give
orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de St. Exupery
All men by nature desire to know.
- Aristotle

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate
of empires depends on the education of youth.
- Aristotle

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.


- Aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

Teaching is the highest form of understanding.


- Aristotle

The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg -- not by
smashing it.
- Arnold Glasow

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same
individual.
- Arthur Koestler

The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.
- B.B. King

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
- Beatrix Potter

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment
in knowledge always pays the best interest.
- Ben Franklin

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to
him his own.
- Benjamin Disraeli

Games lubricate the body and the mind.


- Benjamin Franklin

The biggest atrocity of all is to indoctrinate our children into a system that does not value
their creative expression, nor encourage their unique abilities.
- Benjamin Greene

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the
greatest service that one man can do another.
- Benjamin Jowett
Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
- Bertolt Brecht

Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or
religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main,
which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld,
and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is
done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most
education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.
- Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell

The aim of education should be to teach us how to think, rather than what to think. To
improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, rather than to load the memory
with thoughts of other men.
- Bill Beattie

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
- Bill Cosby

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking
questions.
- Bishop Mandell Creighton

Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.
- Bob Talbert

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him and let him know
that you trust him.
- Booker T. Washington

If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers,
for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told
me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
- Buckminster Fuller

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.


- Buckminster Fuller

Teachers should guide without dictating, and participate without dominating.


- C. B. Neblette

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who
touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth
is a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
- Carl Jung
If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, then
we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness.
- Carl Rogers

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn ...and change.
- Carl Rogers

When you make the finding yourself--even if you are the last person on Earth to see the
light--you will never forget it.
- Carl Sagan

Children have more need of models than of critics.


- Carolyn Coats

A very little key will open a very heavy door.


- Charles Dickens

Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the
only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.
- Charlotte Mason

Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of
a child's nature.
- Charlotte Mason

A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.
- Chinese Proverb

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you
are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
- Chinese proverb

Learning is a treasure which accompanies its owner everywhere.


- Chinese Proverb

One must be a student before one can be a teacher.


- Chinese Proverb

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.


- Chinese Proverb

If you want happiness for a lifetime, help the next generation.


- Chinese saying

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.


- Chuang-Tzu

It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.


- Claude Bernard
You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating
curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.
- Clay P. Bedford

Learning without thought is labor lost.


- Confucius

You cannot open a book without learning something.


- Confucius

Education is soul crafting.


- Cornel West

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain -- and most fools do.
- Dale Carnegie

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves;
and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
- Dorothy L. Sayers

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.


- Dorothy Parker

Education is the ability to meet life's situations.


- Dr. John G. Hibben

Teaching is not just a job. It is a human service and it must be thought of as a mission.
- Dr. Ralph Tyler

Children want the same things we want. To laugh, to be challenged, to be entertained, and
delighted.
- Dr. Seuss

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.


- Dr. W. Edwards Deming

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.
- Edith Ann [Lily Tomlin]

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little
stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it
adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be educated.
- Edith Hamilton

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are
skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.
- Edward De Bono
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
- Edward Everett

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an
obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find
themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
- Eric Hoffer

Perhaps the greatest joy is learning how to motivate yourself.


- Floyd Maxwell

The most beautiful things in the creating of the child are his “mistakes.” The more a child’s
work is full of these individual mistakes the more wonderful it is. And the more a teacher
removes them from the child’s work the duller, more desolate and impersonal it becomes.
- Franz Cizek

Because we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most
meaning to the things we can measure.
- Fred Hargadon

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.


- Frederick Douglass

The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who
think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
- G.K. Chesterton

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is
worth reading.
- G.M. Trevelyan

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.
- Galileo

The more you use your mind, the more you'll have to use.
- George A. Dorsey

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me
from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have
learned at home by myself.
- George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of
the child.
- George Bernard Shaw

Every student can learn. Just not on the same day or in the same way.
- George Evans

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.


- George Santayana

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.
- George Washington

Education is understanding relationships.


- George Washington Carver

I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for ones self.
- George Washington Carver

Be aware that young people have to be able to make their own mistakes, and that times
change.
- Gina Shapira

Children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun.
They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.
- Glenn Doman

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.


- Goethe

One never learns to understand truly anything but what one loves.
- Goethe

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they
are capable of becoming.
- Goethe

Education is not a race, with winners and losers. It's not a commodity to be bought and
sold.
- Grace Llewellyn & Amy Silver

The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the
individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others.
- Grayson Kirk

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other
room and read a book.
- Groucho Marx

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit
the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas
ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive
citizens.
- H. L. Mencken

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe...
- H.G. Wells

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

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.


- Harold S. Hulbert

In an effective classroom students should not only know what they are doing, they should
also know why and how.
- Harry K. Wong

It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.


- Harvey S. Firestone

A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.


- Helen Keller

The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he
is placed.
- Helen Keller

The highest result of education is tolerance.


- Helen Keller

To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.


- Henri Frederic Amiel

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.


- Henri L. Bergson

A teacher affects eternity; no one can tell where his influence stops.
- Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.


- Henry Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the


form of inert facts.
- Henry Brooks Adams
We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with
him, if we would be most helpful to him.
- Henry David Thoreau

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
- Henry David Thoreau

If you think you can do a thing, or think you can't do a thing; you're right.
- Henry Ford

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to
enslave.
- Henry Peter Brougham

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.


- Henry Ward Beecher

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.


- Herbert Spencer

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is
hammering on cold iron.
- Horace Mann

If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.
- Ignacio Estrada

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
- Isaac Asimov

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
- Ivan Illich

The mind grows by what it feeds on.


- J.G. Holland

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
- Jacques Barzun

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a days work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for
twenty years.
- Jacques Barzun

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his
mind.
- Jacques Barzun

Teaching is a strategic act of engagement.


- James Bellanca
There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the
other how to live.
- James Truslow Adams

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a
difference.
- Jane Goodall

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
- Japanese Proverb

The principle goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new
things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
- Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not
simple of repeating what other generations have done--men who are creative, inventive,
and discoverers.
- Jean Piaget

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to
save time, but to squander it.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

True teaching is one that not teaches knowledge but stimulates children to gain it.
- Jill Eggleton

No matter how good teaching may be, each student must take the responsibility for his own
education.
- John Carolus

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.


- John Cotton Dana

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.


- John Cotton Dana

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.


- John Dewey

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.


- John Dewey

All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop
our talent.
- John F. Kennedy

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.


- John F. Kennedy

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could
be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to
trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.
- John Holt

No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems
before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and
no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
- John Holt

Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
- John Holt

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.


- John Keats

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent
schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
- John Lubbock

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child
should be given the wish to learn.
- John Lubbock

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one
another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power
in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing
generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the
mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
- John Stuart Mill

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.


- John Taylor Gatto

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people
cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
- John W. Gardner

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of
pursuing his education.
- John W. Gardner

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is
practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so
primitive.
- John W. Gardner
Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
- John Wooden

The only way to be totally free is through education.


- Jose Marti

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.


- Joseph Addison

The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.


- Joseph Campbell

To teach is to learn twice.


- Joseph Joubert

The final evaluation should not be the hardest part of the course.
- Ken Whytock

Each of us has a spark of life inside us, and our highest endeavor ought to be to set off that
spark in one another.
- Kenny Ausubel

It's not what is poured into a student, but what is planted.


- L. Conway

To see things in the seed, that is genius.


- Lao Tzu

By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.


- Latin Proverb

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and
experience, and has little to do with school or college.
- Lillian Smith

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
- Lily Tomlin

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.


- Linus Pauling

Our children need to be treated as human beings - exquisite, complex and elegant in their
diversity.
- Lloyd Dennis

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from
learning the answer itself.
- Lord Alexander

When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and
respect for what he may become.
- Louis Pasteur

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
- Mahatma Gandhi

In a gentle way, you can shake the world.


- Mahatma Gandhi

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
- Mahatma Gandhi

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can
take for us or spare us.
- Marcel Proust

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead

Education is not something which the teacher does ...it is a natural process which develops
spontaneously in the human being.
- Maria Montessori

Never help a child with a task that they feel they can complete themselves.
- Maria Montessori

The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, The children are now
working as if I did not exist.
- Maria Montessori

To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the
teacher.
- Maria Montessori

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small
daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to the big differences that we often
cannot foresee.
- Marian Wright Edelman

You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals.
- Marie Curie

You will not reap the fruit of individuality in your children if you clone their education.
- Marilyn Howshall
I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.
- Mark Twain

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.


- Mark Twain

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long
run.
- Mark Twain

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read
them.
- Mark Twain

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out
why.
- Mark Twain

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.


- Mark VanDoren

The kids in our classroom are infinitely more significant than the subject matter we teach.
- Meladee McCarty

The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is
too low and we reach it.
- Michelangelo

Training teaches how. Education teaches why.


- Nido Qubein

We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
- Northrop Frye

A man's mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing
that is worth learning can be taught.
- Oscar Wilde

Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.


- Oscar Wilde

Through education comes understanding. Through understanding comes true appreciation.


All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
- Pablo Picasso
Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse.
As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of
being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less
than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the
soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain
self-knowledge--and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students
and my subject.
- Parker Palmer

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own
expectations.
- Patricia Neal

Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.


- Paul Goodman

It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education
that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.
- Paulo Freire

Knowledge, which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind.


- Plato

Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others
to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently, or effectively.
- R. D. Clyde

Don'’ t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
- Rabbinical Saying

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at
least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of
the world we live in.
- Rachel Carson

I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.


- Ralph Waldo Emerson

People only see what they are prepared to see.


- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.


- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of an
education.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

That which we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

What did you ASK at school today?


- Richard Fenyman

The greatest gift you can give another is the purity of your attention
- Richard Moss

In any case, clearly at some point in the first decade of life, the student must begin to direct
their own education and life experiences to shape their future. The rise of civilizations is
more and more lower and middle income children with fires lit. The fall of civilizations is
progressively fewer with fires lit.
- Robert C. Bowman

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self
confidence.
- Robert Frost

When one teaches, two learn.


- Robert Half

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their
lives.
- Robert Maynard Hutchins

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
- Roger Lewin

Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
- Roger Lewin

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement
often nips it in the bud.
- Samuel Butler

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things--the power to tell the good
from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to
the bad and the counterfeit.
- Samuel Johnsons

Teachers teach someone something, in that order.


- Samuel M. Natale
If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities,
many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.
- Samuel Richardson

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.


- Shelby Foote

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.


- Sir Francis Bacon

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
- Sir Walter Scott

The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which
he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the
work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.
- Sir William Osler

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into
passive receptacles...He is a senior student anxious to help his juniors.
- Sir William Osler

I'm always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
- Sir Winston Churchill

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
- Sir Winston Churchill

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.


- Socrates

One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until
you try.
- Sophocles

I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.
- St. Augustine

Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque (I make free adults out of children by means of books
and a balance).
- St. John's College Motto

We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something provided for us, and
toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.
- Stephen Downes

Hack your education.


- Steve Hargadon
My child is not defective
- Steve Hargadon

Education must have an end in view, for it is not an end in itself.


- Sybil Marshall

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.


- Thomas Carruthers

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as
he who lights his taper [(candle)] at mine, receives light without darkening me.
- Thomas Jefferson

What we learn to do, we learn by doing.


- Thomas Jefferson

Every person of learning is finally his own teacher.


- Thomas Paine

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a
different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far
away.
- Thoreau

Learning how to learn is life's most important skill.


- Tony Buzan

Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is
worth reading.
- Trevelyan

The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the
use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.
- Tryon Edwards

Education is not a form of entertainment, but a means of empowering people to take control
of their lives.
- Unknown

A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who
can create their own image.
- Unknown

Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education.


- Victor Hugo

Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma
with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
- Wendy Priesnitz
The Schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
- Will Rogers

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow.
- William Blake

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know.
It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing
where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information
you get.
- William Feather

The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared
for him—not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself
as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.
- Woodrow Wilson

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.


- Yeats

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