Quotes about education

A nation with culture is blessed. To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. It has always seemed to me that symbolism should be restored to the structure of world education. The young are no longer invited to seek the hidden truths, dynamic and eternal, locked within the shapes and behavior of living beings.

I do not think the coerced mind ever really learns an art.

She had been around enough intelligent people to know they worked best in an encouraging environment where study and discovery were rewarded.

Hence the purpose of education. To be young is about action. To be a scholar is about informed action.

I asked the headmaster of literature, "Why are there so many headmasters and so few poets? Is it easier for you to train your own kind than ours?" He said, "No. The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart."

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.

He said—let me get this right—he said that among the chief reasons we can’t cope with the consequence of our own ingenuity is that whenever a genuinely open-minded teacher tries to pass that attitude on to his pupils, the entrenched authorities grow frightened and shut his mouth.

Schools currently excel in encouraging children to express opinions, but are deficient in encouraging children to say, for example, “Oh, that’s different from my perspective – tell me more.”

The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study.

So what's to be said … for a curriculum devoted to a study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of "the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?Well: what's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any good old curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students.

It is all too reminiscent of an old definition of the lecture method of classroom instruction: a process by which the contents of the textbook of the instructor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either party.

To write and speak correctly is certainly necessary; but it is not sufficient. A derivation correctly presented in the book or on the blackboard may be inaccessible and uninstructive, if the purpose of the successive steps is incomprehensible, if the reader or listener cannot understand how it was humanly possible to find such an argument....