Why is it that in most children education seems to destroy the creative urge? Why do so many boys and girls leave school with blunted perceptions and a closed mind? A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they’re fifty? It’s a problem in biochemistry and adult education. Aldous Huxley, interview
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: A Study in Subjective and Objective
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’ – that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful – Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst]. Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education, presidential address to Mathematical Association 1916
Good gracious, you’ve got to educate him first. You can’t expect a boy to be vicious till he’s been to a good school. Hector Hugh Munro, Reginald in Russia 1910, ‘The Baker’s Dozen’
Education – At Mr Wackford Squeer’s Academy, Dotheboys Hall, at the delightful village of Dotheboys, near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, Youth are boarded, clothed, booked, furnished with pocket-money, provided with all the necessaries, instructed in all languages living and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry, the use of the globes, algebra, single stick (if required), writing, arithmetic, fortification, and every branch of classical literature. Terms, twenty guineas per annum. No extras, no vacations, and diet unparalleled. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Minerva House ... where some twenty girls ... acquired a smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 1839
A world core curriculum might seem utopian today. By the end of the year 2000 it will be a down-to-earth daily reality in all the schools of the world ... The underlying philosophy upon which the Robert Muller School is based will be found in the teachings set forth in the books of Alice A Bailey ... The school is now certified as a United Nations Associated School providing education for international cooperation and peace. Robert Muller
This is the story of a dream. The dream of giving the very best education to Britain’s brightest children however humble their background. The grammar schools were set up to deliver this dream. The Grammar School: A Secret History I, BBC 2012
For the grammar schools the key to success lay in the pursuit of excellence. ibid.
Britain’s oldest grammar schools date back to the fourteenth century. ibid.
The new and radical ideas of the sixties would sweep them [grammar schools] away. ibid.
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman vol 9: The Kindly Ones
What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels about education. Harold Howe
She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it. Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent. George Bernard Shaw
For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened – and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars? – Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he knows exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth. William Glasser
Access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society. Kent Conrad
Kingsley’s vision for a perfect childhood included a decent education ... Compulsory education for all children was finally introduced. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders II: Suffer The Little Children, BBC 2010
Every year thousands of children are subjected to the ultimate experiment. We send them to school. But how does education shape our children? Horizon: Who Do You Want Your Child to Be? 2009
Why do some people struggle no matter what? And what is a successful education? ibid.
By 1929 more money is spent on advertising than on education. America: The Story of the US: Bust, History 2010
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. Our requirements for world leadership, our hopes for economic growth, and the demands of citizenship itself in an era such as this all require the maximum development of every young American’s capacity. The human mind is our fundamental resource. John F Kennedy, February 1961
Let us not think of education only in terms of its costs, but rather in terms of the infinite potential of the human mind that can be realized through education. Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our Nation. John F Kennedy, July 1961
The future of any country which is dependent upon the will and wisdom of its citizens is damaged, and irreparably damaged, whenever any of its children is not educated to the full extent of his talent. John F Kennedy, January 1963
The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth. John F Kennedy
No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power ... Quite obviously, there is a higher purpose, and that is the hope that you will turn to the service of the State the scholarship, the education, the qualities which society has helped develop in you; that you will render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or render on the community level, or on the state level, or on the national level, or the international level a contribution to the maintenance of freedom and peace and the security of our country and those associated with it in a most critical time. John F Kennedy, June 1963
Knowledge is not just the preserve of the educated elite. Just because someone has not had a formal education, that does not mean he does not have wisdom and common sense. Vikas Swarup
What concerns me is when belief is used to influence and corrupt education politics ... A form of madness. 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God, Professor Oliver Sacks
I spent three days a week for ten years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of ten years I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories. Ray Bradbury
A college degree is the key to realizing the American dream, well worth the financial sacrifice because it is supposed to open the door to a world of opportunity. Dan Rather