#education

"I never heard that it had been anybody’s business to find out what his natural bent was, or where his failings lay, or to adapt any kind of knowledge to him. He had been adapted to the verses and had learnt the art of making them to such perfection. I did doubt whether Richard would not have profited by some one studying him a little, instead of his studying them quite so much."

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

"If "facts"convinced people of things, no one would have sex"

"Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain."

"Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?"

"The quality of the relationships that students have in class with their peers and teachers is important to their success in school."

"To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society."

"Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers."

"Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges."

"Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance."

"Education, boy, is not something to prepare you for life. That is a vulgar American error.… It's something to take you out of life."

"Book is book."

"People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters."

"A seeker of knowledge is the search for wise words."

"Knowledge and wisdom comes from interaction-- not from inaction."

"There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few."

"nothing that is worth knowing can be taught"

"So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them."

"At the end of your lives you will not be judged by academic successes, the degrees or diplomas earned, the positions held, the material wealth acquired, or power and prestige, but rather on the basis of what you have become as persons and what you are in conduct and character."

"If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated."