Education

"Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances." John Taylor Gatto

"It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching." John Taylor Gatto

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another." John Taylor Gatto

"At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living." Neil Postman

"Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence. The implications of having so many people so incapable of confronting opposing arguments with anything besides ad hominem responses reach far." Thomas Sowell

"In our dreams we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present education conventions made from our minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor shall we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. The task which we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shop and on the farm." Frederick Taylor Gates

"All claims of education notwithstanding, the pupil will accept only that which his mind craves." Emma Goldman

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

"In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know." Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"Schools teach ignorance." Eduardo Galeano

"You stay young as long as you can learn, acquire new habits, and suffer contradictions." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important." Leo Tolstoi

"Those who cannot remember clearly their own childhood are poor educators." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." Mark Twain