The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instil convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. Hannah Arendt
It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought – that is to be educated. Edith Hamilton
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers. Iris Murdoch
[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority. Walter Karp
Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others. Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding. Ezra Pound
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it. Alexandre Dumas
Only the educated are free. Epictetus
Rewards and punishments is the lowest form of education. Chuang Tzu
The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it. Lawrence M Krauss
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves. Joseph Campbell
There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few. Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Centre
Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. John Maynard Keynes, cited Leo Calvin Rosten, Infinite Riches: Gems from a Lifetime of Reading, 1979
The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. H L Mencken
The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens. H L Mencken
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to produce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. H L Mencken
If you want to teach your children that they are the tools of God, you had better not teach them that they are God’s rifles, or we will have to stand firmly opposed to you: your doctrine has no glory, no special rights, no intrinsic and inalienable merit. If you insist on teaching your children false-hoods – that the Earth is flat, that ‘Man’ is not a product of evolution by natural selection – then you must expect, at the very least, that those of us who have freedom of speech will feel free to describe your teachings as the spreading of falsehoods, and will attempt to demonstrate this to your children at our earliest opportunity. Our future well-being – the well-being of all of us on the planet – depends on the education of our descendants. Daniel C Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. Abraham Lincoln
The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. Plato
No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education. Plato
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep – all these ideas, half-formed and half-digested and half-correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. Thomas Moore
All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 per cent of Americans are ‘scientifically illiterate’. That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War – when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there’s a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 per cent illiteracy is extremely serious. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death. Albert Einstein
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. Albert Einstein
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein
To understand a child we have to watch him at play, study him in his different moods; we cannot project upon him our own prejudices, hopes and fears, or mould him to fit the pattern of our desires. If we are constantly judging the child according to our personal likes and dislikes, we are bound to create barriers and hindrances in our relationship with him and in his relationships with the world. Unfortunately, most of us desire to shape the child in a way that is gratifying to our own vanities and idiosyncrasies; we find varying degrees of comfort and satisfaction in exclusive ownership and domination. Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. Robert Ingersoll
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. Will Durant
Poor people cannot rely on the government to come to help you in times of need. You have to get your education. Then nobody can control your destiny. Charles Barkley
The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. Robert M Hutchins
Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline are truly sublime and astonishing. John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams 29th October 1775