bkmarcus.com : quotes : education

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Mark Twain

Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.

Wallace Sayre

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Henry Kissinger

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

William James

How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?

Elliot, "E.T."

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.

Will Rogers

No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending.

Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is a constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read.

Alberto Moravia

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Christopher Morley

Try not to have a good time ... This is supposed to be educational.

Charles Schulz

Whenever anyone says, "theoretically," they really mean, "not really."

Dave Parnas

You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

H.H. Munro

Your education begins where what is called your education is over.

--Anonymous

"If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything."

--Anonymous

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.

--Anonymous

If you are too busy to read, then you are too busy.

--Anonymous

Common sense is a conditioned reflex which we mistake for insight about the universe.

Hugh Kenner

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

Those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination or understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Bertrand Russell

The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many . . . the light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times, 1850

Education is the tendency toward moral despotism raised to a principle.

Leo Tolstoy

I am convinced that the educator undertakes with such zeal the education of the child, because at the base of this tendency lies his envy of the child's purity, and his desire to make him like himself, that is, to spoil him.

Leo Tolstoy

With police action and imprisonment as an ever-present threat for those who dare to disobey, the state tries in myriad ways to control the daily lives of its subjects. It attempts to force all young people into its indoctrination factories, where they are crowded together in same age herds, sometimes forced to all dress alike, expected to respect the authority of self-appointed experts, intimidated or brutalized by violent peers, and frequently not even taught to read or write. People who attempt to rescue their children from this system are treated with suspicion and forced to surrender the privacy of their homes to the inspection of bureaucrats who believe they know better how to take care of their children.

Joe Peacott, anarchy in kansas

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

e. e. cummings "A Poet's Advice to Students"

We live in a society that sometimes pays lip service to thinking for yourself but doesn't particularly encourage it.

Sharon Presley, Ph.D., Independent Thinking Review

Boy, You intellectuals sure have a lot time on your hands.

Email from Rick Lozano, someone I don't know.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It would be a mistake to assume that the present-day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.

Alvin Toffler

Many are drawn to science fiction and fantasy literature because it provides alternate universes where they can speculate about what it would be like to live in a society that respected intelligence over beauty and imagination over conformity.

Katherine Gates in an article about transformation fetishists, The Position

Do you know when you're not being taken?

Babba Ram Das

People have to go out of their minds before they can come to their senses.

Timothy Leary

one cannot judge "art" for the masses unless he is truly average in intellect, thought and creativity, which is usually the case among critics.

billy mac

My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school.

Margaret Mead

When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.

Erasmus

A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world of being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.

Dresden James

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Sir Winston Churchill

What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Yogi Berra

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

Alphonse Bertillon

There's a difference between being educated and being schooled.

bk's review of Deschooling Our Lives

The problem is not that public schools do not work well, but rather that they do. The first goal and primary function of schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we normally label state indoctrination.

Wendy McElroy, Demystifying the State

With the old not much can be done; but with their children, the great remedy is education. The rising generation must be taught as our children are taught. We say must be, because in many cases this can only be accomplished by coercion. . . . Children must be gathered up and forced into schools and those who resist and impede this plan, whether parents or priests, must be held accountable and punished.

Horace Mann,
19th-century creator of "public education",
speaking on the subject of Irish Catholics

An academic has and wants an audience disproportionately made up of teachers and students, while an intellectual has and wants teachers and students in his audience only in proportion to their place in the general educated public.

An academic is a specialist who has disciplined his curiosity to operate largely within a designated area, while an intellectual is a generalist who deliberately does otherwise.

An academic is concerned with substance and suspicious of style, while an intellectual is suspicious of any substance that purports to transcend or defy style.

Jack Miles,
Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:
What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They are Kicked Off Campus?

... for no one can provide pleasure who never seeks pleasure, and no one who never reads for beauty will ever write beautifully.

Jack Miles,
Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:
What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They are Kicked Off Campus?

The voguish phrase public intellectual is at least temporarily useful, but most public intellectuals would be more accurately called public academics; for even as they turn their attention to matters of public interest, they retain their academic appointments and, for much of their professional life, their academic constituency as well. If all intellectuals are understood to have the public as their sole defining constituency, then the adjective public in public intellectual becomes redundant, and the public academic is correctly seen as a mixed or transitional type, an academic moonlighting or auditioning as an intellectual.

Jack Miles,
Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual:
What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They are Kicked Off Campus?

Most parents cannot conceive of a totally privatized alternative because they themselves have been indoctrinated by public schooling to believe in its alleged necessity.

The Central Fallacy of Public Schooling, by Daniel Hager

...despite the prejudices instilled in us by the democratic process and public education, an opinion rooted in ignorance is not the equal of an opinion rooted in even a moderate amount of experience.

L. Neil Smith

Habits of mind are hard to break. Sometimes radical intellectual surgery is the only way.

Lew Rockwell

When young men go to their schools and start killing teachers and classmates, the statists refuse to ask the most obvious question: why did they select a government school as their target? Why have privately owned schools been largely immune from such acts of rage?

Butler Shaffer

At FEE [the Foundation for Economic Education] it's our policy not to tell the government how to run its schools. We just think no one should be forced to attend or pay for them.

Sheldon Richman, Editor, Ideas on Liberty: "PERSPECTIVE: Weighing In"

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.

Ezra Loomis Pound

The Economist (1/24/04) proclaims: "When universities depend on taxpayers, their independence and standards suffer." The article describes British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, as lowering their standards for want of finance. No, public education is not going to improve. (NOTE: I use "public" in American fashion. The British would say "state.")

Jack Powelson, The Quaker Economist, Letter no. 95

Plus, it is not as if the intellectual knows nothing of the world of business: he has, after all, read Dickens and seen Death of a Salesman. What more could one ask?

Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"

Finally, even the worst teacher has what the entertainers, athletes, and salesmen he often resents all crave: a captive audience, full of young, ignorant, and naive people who assume him to be infallible. This can naturally go to one's head, and lead to delusions of competence.

Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"

The professor makes his living lecturing to people, and most of them think he's pretty smart. Who could be better qualified, then, to lecture to society as a whole?

Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"

Repeatedly falsified apocalyptic predictions have made many a fundamentalist preacher into a laughingstock; they made Stanford University eco-alarmist Paul Ehrlich into a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant winner.

Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"

The eggheads who gave us the Great Society inadvertently created an entire underclass: millions of children have grown up without fathers in the decades since, but the eggheads kept their tenure.

Edward Feser, "Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left?"

A class is nothing more than an arbitrary grouping of entities that share common characteristics as determined from a certain epistemological point of view. In short, what constitutes a class is defined by the purposes of the definer.

Wendy McElroy

There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

I don't assume the universe obeys my preconceptions -- ha! -- but I know a frelling fact when it hits me in the face!

Dominar Rigel XVI, Farscape

Who will teach our children the skills that are necessary to become economically productive? Bureaucrats reproduce themselves in the classroom: obedience counts far more than creativity. Teachers are paid to maintain order. If there is actual teaching going on, no one cares too much, one way or the other, unless the teaching is superb. Then envy takes over on the faculty. Pressures are applied. The creative teachers eventually leave.

Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents

Grandparents for thousands of years watered the flowers. Their unofficial job was to discover what a child did well and encourage the child to do it even better. It was the parents? task to maintain order. Uprooting weeds was the parents? task. The grandparent could concentrate on more productive matters.

Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents

"Grandma, look what I made!" was followed by, "That's wonderful!" Then, "Would you like me to show you how I made those when I was a little girl?" In every society I have ever read about, there is some version of this crucial verbal exchange. We can mark the decline of a society by the departure of this verbal exchange.

Gary North, The Abolition of Grandparents

Those of us who believe forcing the unwilling to fund the education of other people's children is immoral, or who think bureaucratized education is systemically flawed and reduces the quality of education, are unlikely to work in government schools. Thus, government schools are structurally biased against free-market thinking. Advocates of economic liberty aren't likely to seek employment in a socialized industry.

Ari Armstrong, Teaching Kids to Love Big Government

Prior to World War I, taxes in all nations were under 10% of income. After World War I, no nation enjoyed this degree of liberty. We get used to the demons we know, including the tax collectors. History textbooks do not remind us of the low-tax world we have lost, because textbooks are written for use in tax-supported public schools, which do not call into question the prevailing tax level, except to suggest higher taxes on the rich.

Gary North

The government has had an iron grip on the American educational system for generations, and it's not about to ease up on that grip by teaching American school children about the virtues of limited government.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, "Constitutional Futility"

The public school is rooted in coercion. No one really wants to be there, so the pressures run in the direction of control, mediocrity, non-accountability, waste, and stupidity. In private school, the pressures tend toward excellence, accountability, and learning. It is not a universal rule, of course, but it is a dominant tendency. What marks the difference is the institution of private property, the structural prerequisite to productive competition.

Lew Rockwell, "Two Kinds of Competition"

A scientist tries to find knowledge nobody ever knew before, and communicate it in terms everybody understands. A poet tries to do just the opposite.

-- ?

... the competitive pressures of the real business world make businessmen smarter than academicians after a while. Businessmen have to please and impress customers for a living. Customers are harsh, unbiased, largely accurate critics. Academicians generally have to please only each other.

Brad Edmonds, "Understanding Businesspeak"

If this is a "little quizzy," I'd sure hate to see your big testies!

Hilary Fleming, Bryn Mawr College, ~ 1960

In my view, if a kid bullies, he ought to--quite literally--be arrested and imprisoned for a time, and punished with severe pain. And if he does it again, he should be imprisoned for a long time, if not ejected from society. I am quite serious. They are criminals, pure and simple. There is no excuse for it.

Stephan Kinsella, "Toward a Theory of Bullying"

Never tell the complete truth to a kid. He might draw accurate conclusions.

Gary North, "Whining Parents"

Most Western intellectuals respect visible power above everything else.

Gary North, "The Asymmetrical Rhetoric of War and Peace"

I know no time which is lost more thoroughly than that devoted to arguing on matters of fact with a disputant who has no facts, but only very strong convictions.

James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, London 1901

You'll know that you have been a success when somebody quotes one of your ideas to you without knowing where it came from.

Anonymous

First, to the extent that government successfully provides little Jimmy with academic skills, he grows up thinking that only the government can teach such skills. Second, insofar as the government fails to endow little Jimmy with scholastic and intellectual prowess, he grows up that much more docile, uncritical, malleable. Either way, the government comes out ahead.

Anthony Gregory, "Government Schools: There's No Success Like Failure"

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Niels Bohr, 1885-1962

bkmarcus.com : quotes : education

blog	essays	quotes	definitions
Search:		Email: www @ bkMarcus . com