Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else. And root out
everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the
principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle
on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir !
- Charles John Huffam Dickens
A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation. - Marcus Tullius Cicero
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
- George Berbard Shaw
A wise system of education will at least teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.
- John Lubbock (Lord Avebury )
A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant
almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.
- Charles Babbage
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always
turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading,
fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.
- Russel Wayne Baker
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
- Eric Hoffer
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.
- Martin H. Fischer
As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded,
but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal.
This is a fundamental weakness.
- Isidor Isaac Rabi
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the
long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.
The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of
better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal
education.
- Alfred Whitney Griswold
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the
sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can
ever learn from books.
- John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)
Education is an organic necessity of a human being.
- Horace Mann
Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it
out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and
enthusiasm for science intact.
- Carl Sagan
Experience of actual fact either teaches fools or abolishes them.
- Thomas Carlyle
First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes,
everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is
most excellent, instruction in the art takes place.- Hippocrates.
How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of
understanding mathematics? ... the skeleton of our understanding, ...
and actually they are the majority. ... We have here a problem that is
not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish
to devote themselves to education.
- Henri Poincare
I turn my eyes to the schools & universities of Europe
And there behold the loom of Locke whose woof rages dire,
Washed by the water-wheels of Newton. Black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation; cruel works
Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.
- William Blake
And there behold the loom of Locke whose woof rages dire,
Washed by the water-wheels of Newton. Black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every nation; cruel works
Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.
- William Blake
I'm afraid for all those who'll have the bread snatched from their
mouths by these machines. ... What business has science and capitalism
got, bringing ail these new inventions into the works, before society
has produced a generation educated up to using them !
- Henrik Johan Ibsen
If the term education may be understood in so large a sense as to
include all that belongs to the improvement of the mind, either by the
acquisition of the knowledge of others or by increase of it through its
own exertions, we learn by them what is the kind of education science
offers to man. It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing — not to
despise the small beginnings, for they precede of necessity all great
things in the knowledge of science, either pure or applied.
- Michael Faraday
If the Weismann idea triumphs, it will be in a sense a triumph of
fatalism; for, according to it, while we may indefinitely improve the
forces of our education and surroundings, and this civilizing nurture
will improve the individuals of each generation, its actual effects will
not be cumulative as regards the race itself, but only as regards the
environment of the race; each new generation must start de novo,
receiving no increment of the moral and intellectual advance made during
the lifetime of its predecessors. It would follow that one deep, almost
instinctive motive for a higher life would be removed if the race were
only superficially benefited by its nurture, and the only possible
channel of actual improvement were in the selection of the fittest
chains of race plasma.
- Henry Fairfield Osborn
If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various
kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to
acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that even were
the order intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to
lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general
mind. But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the
fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilization
in little.
- Herbert Spencer
If we succeed in giving the love of learning, the learning itself is sure to follow.
- John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)
In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times
lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of
medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however,
chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of
comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole
life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is
prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and
limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
In order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with
the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the
gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause.
For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various
organizations and influence them from within. And since our present age
is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence,
one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively
from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capable
and skilled in the practice of his own profession.
- Pope John XXIII
It is curious to reflect on how history repeats itself the world over.
Why, I remember the same thing was done when I was a boy on the
Mississippi River. There was a proposition in a township there to
discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old
farmer spoke up and said if they stopped the schools they would not save
anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be
built.
It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. He'll never get fat. I believe it is better to support schools than jails. - Mark Twain
It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. He'll never get fat. I believe it is better to support schools than jails. - Mark Twain
Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an afterwork, a
poor patching. We are always a little late… We shall one day learn to
supercede politics by education… We must begin higher up, namely in
Education.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Medicine, like every useful science, should be thrown open to the
observation and study of all. It should, in fact, like law and every
important science, be made part of the primary education of the people. …
We should at once explode the whole machinery of mystification and
concealment—wigs, gold canes, and the gibberish of prescriptions—which
serves but as a cloak to ignorance and legalized murder.
- Anonymous
Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
People are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell
Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted,
not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
- Sir Francis Bacon
Science is the reduction of the bewildering diversity of unique events
to manageable uniformity within one of a number of symbol systems, and
technology is the art of using these symbol systems so as to control and
organize unique events. Scientific observation is always a viewing of
things through the refracting medium of a symbol system, and
technological praxis is always handling of things in ways that some
symbol system has dictated. Education in science and technology is
essentially education on the symbol level.
- Aldous (Leonard) Huxley
Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do
not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear
notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Some people get an education without going to college; the rest get it after they get out.
- Anonymous
The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.
- George Bernard Shaw
The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and
boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite
left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other
matters [science] at other ends of the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The great doctors all got their education off dirt pavements and poverty—not marble floors and foundations.
- Martin H. Fischer
The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater
importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation
is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of
science and engineering by the romance of space.
- Arthur C. (Charles) Clarke
The issue is not to teach [a child] the sciences, but to give him the taste for loving them.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
- John Locke
The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of
doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have
done—men who are creative, inventive, and discovers. The second goal of
education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not
accept everything they are offered.
- Jean Piaget
There have been great men with little of what we call education. There
have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never
been a great people who did not possess great learning.
- John Calvin Coolidge
There is a tolerably general agreement about what a university is not. It is not a place of professional education.
- John Stuart Mill
They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline
to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do
not reflect the methods and generalities of art.
- Sir Francis Bacon
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side
stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art,
nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him
something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of
those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are
not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any
other source of them.
- Thomas Henry Huxley
To the distracting occupations belong especially my lecture courses
which I am holding this winter for the first time, and which now cost
much more of my time than I like. Meanwhile I hope that the second time
this expenditure of time will be much less, otherwise I would never be
able to reconcile myself to it, even practical (astronomical) work must
give far more satisfaction than if one brings up to B a couple more
mediocre heads which otherwise would have stopped at A.
- Carl friedrich Gauss
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.
- Mark Twain
What is a good definition ? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a
definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies
only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in
education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the
pupils.
- Henri Poincare
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has
no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the
latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
- George Bernard Shaw
’T is education forms the common mind:
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.
Alexander Pope
Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.
Alexander Pope