“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
Education is about more than classrooms and diplomas. These quotes challenge conventional thinking about learning, teaching, curiosity, and what it actually means to be educated — which, as several of these thinkers point out, has little to do with memorization.
“When a woman earns a dollar, the payback is higher. She'll invest in her children, in their education, health care, and basic needs. The impact of a woman's role in the economy benefits society at large.”
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
“The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.”
“An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.”
“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
“A person like myself, born and raised in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to lower-middle-class parents. But I had the opportunity to get an education, to go and earn a commission in the United States Army, to serve for 22 years, to lead men and women in combat.”
“In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.”
“I can say without affectation that I belong to the Russian convict world no less than I do to Russian literature. I got my education there, and it will last forever.”
“It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.”
“If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.”
“I'm not sure it's the stimulus money that will necessarily allow the economy to recover. It will help to fortify our budgets, frankly, to ensure that there isn't as much backsliding in the areas of education and healthcare, for example.”
“Education is a method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices.”
“I feel very lucky because of my parents and then my education, the opportunities that I've had, so I would like to continue working to improve lives for others.”
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
“Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.”
“Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.”