Education - Select Quotes

On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated. “As much,” said he, “as the living are to the dead.”
~ Diogenes Laertius, in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

They know enough who know how to learn.
~ Henry Adams

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
~ Aristotle

Rhetoric completes the tools of learning. Dialectic zeros in on the logic of things, of particular systems of thought or subjects. Rhetoric takes the next grand step and brings all these subjects together into one whole.
~ William Blake

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call tragedy.
~ Thomas Carlyle

The instructor has to teach history, cosmogony, psychology, ethics, the laws of nations. How can he do it without saying anything favorable or unfavorable about the beliefs of evangelical Christians, Catholics, Socinians, Deists, pantheists, materialists, or fetish worshipers, who all claim equal rights under American institutions? His teaching will indeed be “the play of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted.”
~ R. L. Dabney, in On Secular Education. Moscow, ID: Ransom Press, 1989. page 17.

Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness as it converges on God, just as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion is excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal. The structure of thought must remain a truncated cone, with its proper apex lacking.
~ R. L. Dabney, in On Secular Education. Moscow, ID: Ransom Press, 1989. pages 16-17.

There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried.
~ John Dewey

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.
~ Epictetus, in Discourses

Perhaps the number one problem in public education is the attempt to educate students without a moral point of reference. With a floating target of truth and the desertion of absolutes, the entire system has abandoned its base.
~Kenneth Gangel, in Schooling Choices, edited by Wayne House. Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1988. page 127.

We have too readily blamed shortcomings in American education on social changes (the disorientation of the American family or the impact of television) or incompetent teachers or structural flaws in our schools systems. But the chief blame should fall on faulty theories promulgated in our schools of education and accepted by educational policymakers.
~ E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987.

Schools have, or should have, children for six or seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for thirteen years or more. To assert that they are powerless to make a significant impact on what their students learn would be to make a claim about American education that few parents, teachers, or students would find it easy to accept.
~ E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987. page 20

A man’s mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the things you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned.
~ Thomas H. Huxley

Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
~ William James

A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part but all, of the curriculum of the school.
~ J. Gresham Machen, in Education, Christianity, and the State. Jefferson, MD: Trinity Foundation, 1987. page 81

The most important Christian Education institution is not the pulpit or the school, important as those institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work.
~ J. Gresham Machen, in Education, Christianity, and the State. Jefferson, MD: Trinity Foundation, 1987. page 8

I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the office, both private and public, of peace and war.
~ John Milton, in Areopagitica and Of Education. Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing, 1951. page 60

Educationists are entertaining. We can always find a good laugh in their prose, with its special, ludicrous combination of ignorance and pretentiousness.
~Richard Mitchell, in The Graves of Academe

If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.
~Richard Mitchell, in The Graves of Academe

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
~ Wilson Mizner

People enter schools as question-marks and they leave as periods.
~ Neil Postman

Education is the most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?
~ Charles Potter

The apparent ease with which children learn is their ruin.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Most people would rather die than think — in fact they do!
~ Bertrand Russell

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.
~ Dorothy Sayers, from “The Lost Tools of Learning” in Douglas Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991.

There is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learned nothing–perhaps in particular if we learned nothing–our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value.
~ Dorothy Sayers, from “The Lost Tools of Learning” in Douglas Wilson’s book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991. page 145.

We’re drowning in information, but we’re starved for knowledge.
~ Unknown