Great Throughts Treasury

"Thus education forms the common mind: just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined." - Alexander Pope

"The most creative job in the world. It involves taste, fashion, decorating, recreation, education, transportation, psychology, cuisine, designing, literature, medicine, handicraft, art, horticulture, economics, government, community relations, pediatrics, geriatrics, entertainment, maintenance, purchasing, direct mail, law, accounting, religion, energy, and management. Anyone who can handle all those has to be somebody special. She is. She’s a homemaker." - United Technologies Corporation NULL

"It depends on education to open the gates which lead to virtue or to vice, to happiness or to misery." - Jane Porter

"Education comes to us from nature, from men, or from things. The inner growth of our organs and faculties is the education of nature, the use we learn to make of this growth is the education of men, what we gain by our experience of our surroundings is the education of things. Thus we are each taught by three masters. If their teaching conflicts, the scholar is ill-educated and will never be at peace with himself; if their teaching agrees, he goes straight to his goal, he lives at peace with himself, he is well-educated." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Education as a political weapon could not exist if we respected the rights of children. If we respected the rights of children, we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions; but education as a political institution endeavors to form habits and to circumscribe knowledge in such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable." -

"Education is, as a rule, the strongest force on the side of what exists and against fundamental change: threatened institutions, while they are still powerful, possess themselves of the educational machine, and instill a respect for their own excellence into the malleable minds of the young." -

"Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry... Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster." -

"One generation of fearless women could transform the world, by bringing into it a generation of fearless children, not contorted into unnatural shapes, but straight and candid, generous, affectionate, and free. Their ardor would sweep away the cruelty and pain which we endure because we are lazy, cowardly, hard-hearted and stupid. It is education that gives us these bad qualities, and education that must give us the opposite virtues. Education is the key to the new world." -

"True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality the inequality of success; the glorious inequality of talent, of genius, for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world." - Felix Schelling, fully Felix Emmanuel Schelling

"Consideration is not merely a matter of emotional goodwill but of intellectual vigor and moral self-sacrifice. Wisdom must combine with sympathy. That is why consideration underlies the phrase "a scholar and a gentleman," which really sums up the ideal of the output of a college education." - Charles Seymour

"The worst education which teaches self-denial is better than the best which teaches everything else and not that." - John Sterling

"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"I am convinced that it is of primordial importance to learn more every year than the year before. After all, what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn." -

"Knowledge does not comprise all which is contained in the large term of education. The feelings are to be disciplined; the passions are to be restrained; true and worthy motives are to be inspired; a profound religious feeling is to be instilled, and pure morality inculcated under all circumstances. All this is comprised in education." - Daniel Webster

"Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free." - Robert C. Winthrop,fully Robert Charles Winthrop

"Freedom springs from within, whether in a man or in a people. To remove disabilities and confer the franchise is not enough. Men must be enabled to grow if they are to exercise their rights with dignity and effect. For this reason the widening of the franchise in democratic countries has always been accompanied or followed by the development of popular education." - Basil Alfred Yeaxlee

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts." - Henry Gardiner Adams

"The whole object of education is, or should be, to develop mind. The mind should be a thing that works. It should be able to pass judgment on events as they arise, make decisions." - Sherwood Anderson

"Education should be a way of making inquiring minds inquire. Students enter school as question marks but in too many schools they leave as periods. We must teach them to imagine, to train their memories." -

"The investigation of the meaning of words is the beginning of education." - Antisthenes NULL

"What is the grossest form of neglect? If a man does not... devote every effort toward the education of his children." - Apocrypha NULL

"It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson

"The highest task of education is training for duty." - Berthold Auerbach

"All education starts with forbidding." - Leo Baeck

"The central purpose of American education is to prepare man to think and the major challenge facing us today is to keep man thinking." - Milo Bail

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

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

"Good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world as one which enables him to sustain failure." - Bernard Iddings Bell, formerly Bruce Chilton, fully Canon Bernard Iddings Bell

"If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson

"A sense of curiosity is nature's original school of education." -

"If you think education is expensive - try ignorance." - Derek Bok, fully Derek Curtis Bok

"Many earnest persons, who have found direct education for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare that they first began to learn when they began to teach, and that in education of others they discovered the secret of their own." - Gamaliel Bradford

"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." - Lord Brougham, fully Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

"Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms." - Brown v. Board of Education NULL

"We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment." - Brown v. Board of Education NULL

"Education is anything that we do for the purpose of taking advantage of the experience of some one else." - Lyman Bryson

"To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education." -

"By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely." - Karl Bühler, fully Karl Ludwig Bühler

"There are five tests of the evidence of education - correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection, efficiency or the power to do." - Nicholas Murray Butler

"The teaching of any science, for purposes of liberal education, without linking it with social progress and teaching its social significance, is a crime against the student mind. It is like teaching a child how to pronounce words but now what they mean." - Vernon Carter

"Into what boundless life does education admit us. Every truth gained through it expands a moment of time into illimitable being - positively enlarges our existence, and endows us with qualities which time cannot weaken or destroy." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems." - Harry Woodburn Chase

"The acceptance of women as authority figures or as role models is an important step I female education... It is this process of identification, respect, and then self-respect that promotes growth." -

"Method and punctuality are so little natural to man that where they exist they are commonly the effect of education or discipline." - William Benton Clulow

"Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race" - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

"Neither piety, nor liberty can long flourish in a community where the education of youth is neglected." - Albert Cooper, fully Albert Glen Cooper

"Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents." - Paul Copperman

"People sometimes refer to higher education as the higher learning, but colleges and universities are much more than the knowledge factories; they are testaments to man's perennial struggle to make a better world for himself, his children, and his children's children. This, indeed, is their sovereign purpose. They are great fortifications against ignorance and irrationality; but they are more than places of higher learning - they are centers and symbols of man's higher yearning." - William H. Cowley

"If these distracted times prove anything, they prove that the greatest illusion is reliance upon the security and permanence of material possessions. We must search for some other coin. And we will discover that the treasure-house of education has stood intact and unshaken in the storm. The man of cultivated life has founded his house upon a rock. You can never take away the magnificent mansion of his mind." - John Cudahy, fully John Clarence Cudahy

"The sure foundations of the State are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin." - George William Curtis