One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.        –Maria Montessori

 

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

–Oliver Wendell Holmes

No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.

–Emma Goldman

 

The purpose of education... is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

 –James Baldwin

 

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.    –Henry Peter Broughan

 

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.           –Anatole France

 

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.          –H.L. Mencken

 

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.          –Albert Einstein

 

Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.    –Alfred North Whitehead

 

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.    –B.F. Skinner

 

The chief object of education is not to learn things, but to unlearn things.   –G.K. Chesterton

 

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

–Adolf Hitler

 

Of course, Behaviorism “works.” So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.     –W.H. Auden

 

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.  

–Thomas Henry Huxley

 

School administrators intone that “in order for learning to take place, there must be order in the classroom.” That may be true, but I feel the emphasis is in the wrong place. In order for learning to take place, there should be something worth learning.

–Susan Ohanian

 

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.      –Cicero

 

The transmigration of life takes place in one’s mind. Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks, that he becomes.   –The Upanishads

 

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)