Quotes about education

"Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge." "Certainly." "You say that a man's first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job?" "Of course." "Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position." "As a mathematician I can hardly agree with you that disorder is preferable to order." "Mathematician my foot! Do you know anything about linear algebra? How are you on diophantine equations? Could you tell me, in a few words, what Bertrand Russell has added to modern mathematical concepts? You are a mathematician in the way that a teacher of beginners on the piano is a musician!"

Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.

Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.

That was encouraging; a person who can read and write and has a head for math can learn anything she needs to know.

Wong shook his head sadly. “I sometimes think that modern education is deliberately designed to handicap a boy.”

“I learned a great deal,” said Beran. “And then I lost all heart for further learning.”

Palafox’s eyes glinted. “Education is not achieved through the heart—it is a systematization of the mental processes.”

“But I am something other than a mental process,” said Beran. “I am a man. I must reckon with the whole of myself.”

A middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the "lower classes."

And I says back to him, “Calvin, sounding like an educated man don’t make you educated,” and he says back to me, “I'd rather be ignorant and sound educated than be educated and sound ignorant,” and I said, “Why?” and he says to me, “Because if you sound educated then nobody ever tests you to find out, but if you sound ignorant they never stop.”

The more we emphasize teaching a merely Right-Hand map of systems theory or a Gaia Web of Life, instead of equally emphasizing the importance of interior development from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric, then the more we are contributing to Gaia's demise.

Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.

Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.

It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month club stick together.