It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot
read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the
natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards
The experience of the race shows that we get our most important
education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily
task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right
paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
Education is the transmission of civilization.
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been
convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed
off some of the originality.
We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without
brightening our own.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a
smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the
babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human
race.
Education and the Social Order
Conservatives say teaching sex education in the public schools
will promote promiscuity. With our education system? If we promote promiscuity
the same way we promote math or science, they've got nothing to worry about.
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 thoughts of other men.
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate
from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education;
they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.
With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity
than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for
decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the
developing of character in men, than any other association of men.
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
I may have been lucky with some sort of intuition, but I believe
in training a great deal.
The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of
values.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to
learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent
disinclination to do so.
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.
To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is
educated.
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.
Discourses
You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your
horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you
enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything
happens.
Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can't make him
think.
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers.
My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller
that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school
disciplines. If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don't
happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it
interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with
their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline
problems boredom really is. Research has shown that boredom is closely related
to frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably
irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the
whole show.
When We Deal With Children
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into
superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
Education: a debt due from present to future generations.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn,
but to unlearn.
History is a race between education and catastrophe.
Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a
tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious,
groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited
with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my
education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of
knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the
wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of
ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his
influence stops.
I was determined to know beans. Walden
Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress
implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education
creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his
development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a
collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses
against it till he suffocates and dies.
The people must know before they can act, and there is no
educator to compare with the press.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders,
but they have never failed to imitate them.
Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help
them to become what they are capable of being.
Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower
classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and
generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in
stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.
I believe that education is the fundamental method of social
progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or the
threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward
arrangements, are transitory and futile.... But through education society can
formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus
shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes
to move.... Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union
of science and art conceivable in human experience.
My Pedagogic Creed, 1897
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a
preparation for future living.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their
education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for
growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except
where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate
provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of
wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a
democratic society.
Remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our
first great scholars.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On
Being a Teacher
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive;
easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you don't
consider your students to be human beings.
Kindness trumps greed: it asks for sharing. Kindness trumps
fear: it calls forth gratefulness and love. Kindness trumps even stupidity, for
with sharing and love, one learns.
We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all
around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the
more we are capable of seeing.
Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were
going to die tomorrow.
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all
politics can do is keep us out of war.
Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving
your community and world better than you found it.
Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492
and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either
occasion.
First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He
created school boards.
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer,
and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they
conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal.
That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to
know that the bottom half of it is rotten.
1908, notebook
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could
hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was
astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
To repeat what others have said, requires education, to
challenge it,
requires brains.
requires brains.
If your heart acquires strength, you will be able to remove
blemishes from others without thinking evil of them.
In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you
can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to
change the world.
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist
once he grows up.
A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though
awakens your own expectations.
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to
facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present
system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the
means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and
discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what
you get if you don't.
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.
Skill to do comes of doing.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take
himself for better for worse as his portion . . . It is the harder because you
will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you
know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy
in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of
the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be
understood.
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would
need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude.
See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the
natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you
shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should
be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young
men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have
the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by
awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this
by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself.
The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for
men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.
The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is
demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know
just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers.
All I really need to know ... I learned in kindergarten.
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without
education than to have education without common sense.
Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when
they teach.
An educated person is one who has learned that information
almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false,
misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by
running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All
those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails;
more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and
less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities
to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more
beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.
Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit
their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is
in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor
caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not
even have a trade.
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have
them afterward.
If all the rich and all of the church people should send their
children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money
on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up
every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever or whatever abysses nature
leads, or you will learn nothing.
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with
their own government.
History is Philosophy teaching by examples.
Some children's answers to church school questions - from the
Church of England:
These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of
the past, wisdom is of the future.
As the twig is bent the tree inclines.
The first duty of a lecturer: to hand you after an hour's
discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your
notebooks, and keep on the mantlepiece forever.
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of
course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and
ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we
must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
Only people who die very young learn all they really need to
know in kindergarten.
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a
fire.
Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the
improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in
his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow
creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the
world.
But the ground of a man's [sic] culture lies in his nature, not
in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent
dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a
man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.
I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in
action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to
do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being
of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that
which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and
expansion.
Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application
immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few
associations.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of
quotations.
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