Quotes About Education

True story - I was inspired to "career switch" from consulting to teaching by a quote: "You need to be the change you want to see in the world" - Gandhi.  After years of reading (and sometimes authoring) reports that predicted various dire future outcomes for our world, eventually accepted that the only way to avoid the calamities these papers kept forecasting was if people start making better informed, better considered choices than they have made so far. 

There may have been a time when readin', writin', and 'rithmatic were good enough, but the world we live in now demands that its citizens possess serious critical thinking chops.  We desperately need citizens who can be relied upon to proactively gather info, analyze it, prioritize it, and then take appropriate action upon it. 
 
The quotes gathered below have been assembled from various publications and websites, over time, to remind me (especially after one of "those" days) why I am doing this.

The purpose of education

• "Give a child a fish and he eats for a day; teach a child to fish and he will never go hungry" - old proverb (variously attributed)
• "Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained" - James A. Garfield (1831-1881) President of the United States
• "Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends" - Benjamin Disraeli
• "Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave" - Lord Brougham
• "Whenever people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government" - Thomas Jefferson
• "Remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars" - John F. Kennedy
• "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world" - Nelson Mandela
• "Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war" - Maria Montessori
• "Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army" - Edward Everett
• "The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action." - Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) English philosopher, political theorist 
• "Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answers to all questions" - William Allin
• "Education costs money, but then so does ignorance" - Sir Claus Moser
• "A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear" - James B. Stockdale
• "A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness" - from The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe, 1764.
• "History is a race between education and catastrophe" - H.G. Wells
• "Only the educated are free" - Epictetus (55 - 135 AD)

The nature of education

• "Education is not filling a bucket but the lighting of a fire" - William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish poet, dramatist
• "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know.  It's about being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't" - Anatole France (1844-1924)
• "Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance" - Will Durant
• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" - Aristotle (384-322 BC)
• "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field" - Niels Bohr (1885-1962) physicist
• "The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows" - Sydney J. Harris
• "Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school" - Albert Einstein
• "I am still learning" - Michelangelo

On teaching

• "Who dares to teach must never cease to learn" - John Cotton Dana
• "A teacher effects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops" - Henry Brooks Adams
• "I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think" - Socrates
• "The job of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts" - C.S. Lewis
• "Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left alone to educate themselves" - Abbe Dimnet
• "Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve" - Roger Lewin
• "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand" - old proverb (variously attributed)
• "Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself" - Chinese proverb

Just for fun

• "First, God created idiots.  That was just for practice.  Then He created school boards" - Mark Twain
• "It'll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers" - variously attributed
• "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten it" - Brander Matthews
• "Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't" - Pete Seeger
• "You can get all A's and still flunk life" - Walker Percy