This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
The main fact about education is that there is no such thing. Education is a word like "transmission" or "inheritance"; it is not an object, but a method.
Education | Inheritance | Method | Object |
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
Capitalism | Education | Struggle |
Fortunately or otherwise we live at a time when the average individual has to know several times as much in order to keep informed as he did only thirty or forty years ago. Being "educated" today requires not only more than a superficial knowledge of the arts and sciences, but a sense of interrelationship such as is taught in few schools. Finally, being "educated" today, in terms of the larger needs, means preparation for world citizenship; in short, education for survival.
Citizenship | Education | Individual | Knowledge | Means | Order | Sense | Survival | Time | World |
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
What is needed to make democracy work as it is not now working- to bring into existence in reality a sound conception of democracy? The mass liberal education of the mass electorate. Not just schooling, but an education that involves moral training as well as training of the mind.
Democracy | Education | Existence | Mind | Reality | Sound | Training | Work |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
History is taught with little regard to the ecology, the economics, the sociology or psychology - let alone the biology - that are necessary to understand human action. The same is true of all other academic subjects. Yet if we continue to teach physics separately from ethics, or molecular biology without concern for empathy, the chances of a monstrous evolutionary miscarriage are going to increase. To avoid these possibilities, it is imperative to begin thinking about a truly integrative, global education that takes seriously the actual interconnectedness of causes and effects.
Action | Economics | Education | Empathy | Ethics | Global | History | Little | Psychology | Regard | Teach | Thinking | Understand |
The philosophic aim of education must be to get one out of his isolated class and into one humanity.
The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected.
Education | Excellence | Important | Play | Right | Soul | Training | Will | Excellence | Child |
We must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put into a soul knowledge that was not there before - rather as if they could but sight into blind eyes. On the contrary, our argument indicates that this is a capacity which is innate in each man’s soul, and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness to light unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the entire soul must be turned away from this world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which we have called the Good.
Argument | Body | Capacity | Change | Darkness | Education | Good | Knowledge | Light | Man | Reality | Soul | World |
Let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to discover the [child's] natural bent.
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Better | Education | Envy | Good | Ignorance | Imitation | Man | Nature | Power | Suicide | Time | Universe |
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
To receive a proper education is the source and root of all goodness.
The study of history is in the truest sense an education and a training for political life... The most instructive, or rather the only, method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune is to recall the catastrophes of others.
Dignity | Education | Fortune | History | Learning | Life | Life | Method | Sense | Study | Training | Vicissitudes |