Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety per cent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight per cent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children[’s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don’t understand. Noam Chomsky
The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich country, but education is free. Germany, education is free. France, education is free. Noam Chomsky
I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself – the working-class tradition of self-education. Ken Livingstone
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. Epictetus, Discourses
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them. Thomas More, Utopia
The proper place for the study of religious beliefs is in a church or temple, at home, or in a course on comparative religions, but not in a biology class. There is no place in our world for an ideology that seeks to close minds, force obedience, and return the world to a paradise that never was. Students should learn that the universe can be confronted and understood, that ideas and authority should be questioned, that an open mind is a good thing. Education does not exist to confirm people’s superstitions, and children do not learn to think when they are fed only dogma. Tim Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion. Thomas Jefferson
The bottom line is that the government is getting what they have ordered. They do not want your children to be educated. They do not want you to think too much. That is why our country and our world has become so proliferated with entertainments, mass media, television shows, amusement parks, drugs, alcohol and every kind of entertainment to keep the human mind entertained, so that you don’t get in the way of important people by doing too much thinking. You had better wake up and understand that there are people who are guiding your life and you don’t even know it. Jordan Maxwell, Matrix of Power
We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart. Walter Scott
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education. Walter Scott
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, BBC 1973
Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning. Anton Chekhov
I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers. Woody Allen
His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy. Woody Allen
We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. Maria Montessori
The very cornerstone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers. We say this, not because we think opinions unimportant, but because of the immense importance which we attach to them; for in proportion to the degree of intellectual power and love of truth which we succeed in creating, is the certainty that (whatever may happen in any one particular instance) in the aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result; and intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoner is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them. John Stuart Mill, Civilization
Every man of any education would rather be called a rascal, than accused of deficiency in the graces. Samuel Johnson
Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
You can never be overdressed or overeducated. Oscar Wilde
Children have a natural antipathy to books – handicraft should be the basis for education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous. Oscar Wilde
Education made us what we are. Helvetius, De L’esprit, 1758
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. Malcolm X
Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends. Benjamin Disraeli, speech House of Commons 15th June 1874
There is no education like adversity. Benjamin Disraeli
I read Shakespeare and the Bible and I can shoot dice. That’s what I call a liberal education. Tallulah Bankhead, 1903-1968, Saturday Evening Post 12th April 1947
Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge. Mark Twain
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty. Mark Twain
Brown v Board of Education of Topeka 347 US 483 (1954): Segregated school children and the basis of race and colour was unconstitutional. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1929-1934, PBS 2000
By education most have been misled;
So they believe, because they so were bred.
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man. John Dryden, 1631-1700, The Hind and the Panther
So that, you know, I was eager to distinguish the straight from the crooked, and to hunt for truth in the groves of Academe. Horace
The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man, and we expect to train a young child by making him reason! This is beginning at the end; this is making an instrument of a result. If children understood how to reason they would not need to be educated. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Henry Brooks Adams, 1838-1918
But the numbers were also having a strange and perverse effect on New Labour’s vision of a freer and more open Britain. They were in fact creating a more rigid and stratified society. At the heart of this was Education and the league tables for schools. The tables showed parents which were the best-performing schools and which were the worst ones. The government said that this would incentivise the less successful ones to compete and improve their services. And then standards would rise across the country. In fact the very opposite happened. Rich parents moved into the areas of the best schools which then caused house prices to spiral, keeping the poor out. And nearly all schools taught their pupils only those narrow facts they would need to answer in exams. And so would help the schools rise up the league tables. What was lost was the wider education that would help the poorer children rise up in society. Adam Curtis, The Trap, BBC 2007
In 2006 a series of reports made it clear that there was a definite link between the government’s policies in Education and the rise of social segregation based on wealth. This has contributed to a much wider problem. Social mobility in Britain has now ground to a halt. ibid.