This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess,, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often waste its efforts in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.
The things taught in schools are not an education but the means of an education.
I believe that our experience instructs us that the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know and what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret.
Education | Experience |
The things taught in school are not an education but the means of an education.
My greatest complaint of education is that it is so loaded with material you never move in the spirit again.
We see processes like love and education as established circumstances rather than as complex temporal organisms whose lives depend on regular nourishment and renewal.... Like still cameras, our minds consistently convert motion into stasis.
Circumstances | Education | Love |
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which they took no interest. For it is part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with accuracy the characteristic circumstances of their education - what furthered, what hindered, what in any way modified it.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
Grow! Man is never finished. Man never arrives. Education never stops.
Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned, and however early a person's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that they learn thoroughly.
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
Alfred "Trader Horn" Aloysius, born Alfred Aloysius Smith
The first thing education teaches you is to walk alone.
César Chávez, fully César Estrada Chávez
A word as to the education of the heart: We don't believe that this can be imparted through books; it can only be imparted through the loving touch of the teacher.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry... Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.
Belief | Care | Difficulty | Dogma | Education | Good | Industry | Knowledge | Skepticism | Time | Skeptic |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
One generation of fearless women could transform the world, by bringing into it a generation of fearless children, not contorted into unnatural shapes, but straight and candid, generous, affectionate, and free. Their ardor would sweep away the cruelty and pain which we endure because we are lazy, cowardly, hard-hearted and stupid. It is education that gives us these bad qualities, and education that must give us the opposite virtues. Education is the key to the new world.
Children | Cruelty | Education | Pain | Qualities | World | Cruelty |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Education as a political weapon could not exist if we respected the rights of children. If we respected the rights of children, we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions; but education as a political institution endeavors to form habits and to circumscribe knowledge in such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable.
Children | Education | Inevitable | Knowledge | Rights |
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., fully Eric Donalid Hirsch, Jr.
We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.