Education Quotes

Sooner or later I will get these Education Quotes organized. Quotes from them Goofey Greeks will have their own section; Einstein will have his own section etc.

"You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance." ~Franklin P. Jones

"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play." ~Abraham Maslow American psychologist 1908-1970

"Whoever wants to understand much must play much." ~Gottfried Benn German physician 1886-1956

"Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning." ~Fred Rogers American television personality 1928-2003

"People tend to forget that play is serious." ~David Hockney Contemporary British painter

"Do not…keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play." ~Plato Greek philosopher 427-347 BCE

"Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father." ~Roger von Oech Contemporary American creativity guru

Not to hit you over the head with it but these quotes but perhaps maybe just might become part of your teaching philosophy. I try to keep these quotes in mind when I play math with my students. Grander men than me have left behind these words so that I might also understand the crucial role of play.

"We didn't do anything dad, we just played with blocks." ~My favorite quote from a little girl who went from "F" to "A".

“It isn't enough just to learn -- one must learn how to learn, how to learn without classrooms, without teachers, without textbooks. Learn, in short, how to think and analyze and decide and discover and create." -- Michael Bassis

“It isn't enough just to learn -- one must learn how to learn, how to learn without classrooms, without teachers, without textbooks. Learn, in short, how to think and analyze and decide and discover and create." -- Michael Bassis

Yeah, I know it's there twice.

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." ~Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well." ~René Descartes

“To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it, requires brains.” ~Mary Pettibone Poole

"I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework." ~Edith Ann, [Lily Tomlin]

"You teach best what you most need to learn." ~Richard David Bach

"A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.” ~Anonymous

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. ~Edward Everett

You can get all A's and still flunk life. ~Walker Percy

He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” ~Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” ~Will Durant

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." ~John Cotton Dana

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." ~Henry Brooks Adams

"The most important outcome of education is to help students to become independent of formal education." ~Paul E. Gray

"When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course." ~Peter Drucker

"Education is the movement from darkness to light." ~Allan Bloom

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave."~Frederick Douglass -[Frederick Baily 1818-1895]

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890

Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use? It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that. All we need to do is start the war on education. If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics. ~Leighann Lord

"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants." ~John W. Gardner

"Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide." ~ The Buddha [Gautama Siddharta] (563 - 483 BC)

"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child." ~George Bernard Shaw

"Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don't know." ~R. Verdi

"Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century." ~Perelman

"When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, 'As much as the living are to the dead.'" ~Diogenes Laetius

"From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery." ~Alfred North Whitehead

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." ~Albert Einstein

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.” ~Albert Einstein

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” ~Albert Einstein

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." ~Mark Twain

"I do not teach, I relate." ~Montaigne

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward." ~Vernon Law

"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune." ~Jim Rohn

"Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding." ~Ambrose Bierce

"Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively." ~R.D. Clyde

"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance." ~Sir Claus Moser

"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life." ~Source Unknown

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it." ~J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

"Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education." ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

"To state a theorem and then to show examples of it is literally to teach backwards." ~E. Kim Nebeuts

"The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself." ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." ~Anatole France

"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think." ~Socrates

“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself." ~Chinese Proverb

"Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it." ~Sir William Haley

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think." ~Anne Sullivan

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." ~Malcolm Forbes

“Nine tenths of education is encouragement.” ~Anatole France

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.” ~Bill Beattie

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” ~Epictetus

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” ~James Madison

“Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.” ~Edward Everett

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." ~Henry Brooks Adams

"Much learning does not teach understanding." ~Heraclitus

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~William Arthur Ward

“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

“You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.” ~Ethel Barrymore

“Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is. Research has shown that boredom is closely related to frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show.” ~Fritz Redl

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” ~George Santayana

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” ~Goethe

“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” ~H. G. Wells

“I was determined to know beans.” ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” ~James Baldwin

"The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions." ~James Baldwin

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” ~John Dewey

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” ~John Powell

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." ~Malcolm S. Forbes

“First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards.” ~Mark Twain

“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.” ~Mark Twain

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” ~Nelson Mandela

“Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.” ~Rabbinical saying.

“The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.” ~Robert Green Ingersoll

“You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.” ~Saint Francis de Sales

“Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward.” ~St. Francis Xavier

“The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.” ~Aristotle

“Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.” ~George Evans

“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” ~Plato

“Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

"Education is learning more than it is being taught. It's the chemistry of curiosity exposed to information. In that sense all of life is potentially school. And even I can pass that." ~Bob Guiccione, Jr.

“Learning to teach is a bigger job than universities, schools, experience, or personal disposition alone can accomplish.” ~Sharon Feiman-Nemser

"Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers." ~Richard Bach

“It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves.” ~Robert Hutchins

“They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.” ~Anonymous

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it." ~Alexandre Dumas

Dumbass...?

"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge." ~Benjamin Disraeli

"I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand." ~Chinese Proverb

“The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.” ~Paul Karl Feyerabend

"There is a brilliant child locked inside every student." ~Marva Collins

"Teaching is not a profession; it's a passion." ~Unknown

Those last three quotes are so true it hurts.

"Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism." ~David M. Burns

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." ~Mark Twain

"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." ~Aristotle

"Education is more than filling a child with facts. It starts with posing questions." ~D.T. Max

"It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers -- they help us to learn." ~John Bradshaw

HUGE:

"You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives." ~Clay P. Bedford

"Nothing is ever achieved without enthusiasm." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Learning is not a spectator sport." ~Anonymous

"Math is not a spectator sport." ~Jerry Mortensen

"The important thing is not to stop questioning." ~Albert Einstein

"What we learn with pleasure we never forget." ~Alfred Mercier

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~William Arthur Ward

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." ~Gandhi

"You learn something every day if you pay attention." ~Ray LeBlond

"The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil to learn is hammering on cold iron." -- Horace Mann

"Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation." ~Mark Twain

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. -- Chinese Proverb

"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me." ~Dudley Field Malone

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." ~Marvin Minsky

"The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn." ~John Lubbock

"People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong." ~Bill Vaughan

"Nothing is more powerful and liberating than knowledge." ~William H. Gray III

"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance." ~Claus Moser

"Most teachers waste their time by asking questions which are intended to discover what a pupil does not know whereas the true art of questioning has for its purpose to discover what the pupil knows or is capable of knowing." ~Albert Einstein

Figure out what they know so you can teach them what they don't...

"Students learn more when they complete homework that is graded, commented upon, and discussed by their teachers. The teacher's feedback -- reinforcing what has been done correctly and re-teaching what has not -- is key." ~Nancy Protheroe

"It is a greater work to educate a child, in the true and larger sense of the word, than to rule a state." ~William Ellery Channing

"Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater." ~Albert Einstein

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~Abraham Maslow

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

"Instruction ends in the school-room, but education ends only with life." ~Frederick W.Robertson

"I teach therefore I am." ~Anonymous

"The role of parents in the education of their children cannot be overestimated." ~Unknown

"Teachers are not there to educate your children. Teachers are there to assist you in the education of your children." ~Jerry Mortensen

"We learn...
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we both hear and see
70% of what is discussed
80% of what we experience personally
95% of what we teach to someone else"
– William Glasser

"The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers." ~Margaret Mead

"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." -- B. F. Skinner

"To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully." ~Tyron Edwards

"To learn, you must want to be taught." ~Proverbs 12:1

Parents are always appalled when I tell them NOT to bring their students if they really don't want to come to tutoring. I mean it, and that's why...hard to teach anything if they don't want to learn; something figured out thousands of years ago and passed down to us from the Bible itself. Now, consider the plight of the public school teacher who has no such luxury...

"Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education." ~Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve." ~Roger Lewin

"Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." ~Albert Einstein

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." ~Jonathan Swift

"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." ~Albert Einstein

"Only the educated are free." ~Epictetus

"One machine can do the work of fifty men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." ~ Unknown

"It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question." ~Decouvertes

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. ~Clay P. Bedford

When the student is ready, the master appears. ~Buddhist Proverb

Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire. ~William Butler Yeats

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated. ~Al McGuire

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. ~Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions. ~Bishop Mandell Creighton

You learn something every day if you pay attention. ~Ray LeBlond "The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives." ~Robert Maynard Hutchins

"Education is too important to be left solely to the educators." ~Francis Keppel

"Resisting conformity and developing some small eccentricities are among the steps to independence and self-confidence." ~A. L. McGinnis

"Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise." ~Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

We know the way we teach math in our public schools does NOT work but why change now? Let's just keep doing it the same way...even though we know it doesn't work. Sounds ridiculous but that's exactly what's going on; good thing though or I'd never have built this website...

"One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests." ~Robert Green Ingersoll

"The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before." ~Elbert Hubbard

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think." ~James Beattie

"Do you think you can maintain discipline?" asked the Superintendent. "Of course I can," replied Stuart. "I'll make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself." ~E.B. White, Stuart Little

"The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do." ~John Stuart Mill

"Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I have done to date." ~Ann Richards

"Great teachers empathize with kids, respect them, and believe that each one has something special that can be built upon." ~Ann Lieberman

“What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.” ~R. Buckminster Fuller

"That's why it comes back to math. Math has no bias. It doesn't come from TV. It doesn't know what you're wearing. Math treats all people equally. Especially when you're in a hard class with all boys, when nobody's cheering you on from the sidelines, when it's not "cool" to be smart, math is a nice thing to have. When nothing else makes sense, math reaches an answer." ~Rebecca L. Eisenberg, in Girls Need Math, in the Examiner.

"It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." ~ Some Female PTA Parent

"The education of a man is never completed until he dies." ~Robert E. Lee

"I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma." ~Eartha Kitt

“Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.” ~Albert Einstein

“Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach” ~Albert Einstein

"I have no particular talent. I am only inquisitive." ~Albert Einstein

"The value of an education ... is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." ~Albert Einstein

“When one teaches, two learn.” ~Robert Heinlein

"Technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery of simplicity." ~ E Christopher Zeeman, Catastrophe Theory, 1977

"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom." ~George Washington Carver

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." ~Albert Einstein

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

"The series of integers is obviously an invention of the human mind, a self-created tool which simplifies the ordering of certain sensory experiences." -- Albert Einstein

"In the beginning (if there was such a thing), God created Newton’s laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces. This is all; everything beyond this follows from the development of appropriate mathematics methods by means of deduction." ~Albert Einstein

"Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes." ~John Dewey

"The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms." ~Albert Einstein

"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which which neither freedom nor justice can be maintained." ~James A. Garfield

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. ~Kahlil Gibran

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