One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.

– Maria Montessori

Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your textbooks, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.

 – Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and        philosopher (1861–1947)

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,            teacher and writer

If anything concerns me, it’s the oversimplification of something as complex as assessment. My fear is that learning is becoming standardized. Learning is idiosyncratic. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn’t fit into bubbles.

 – Michele Forman, 2001 US Teacher of the Year

The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern... for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms – from kindergarten to graduate school – in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic “creative hours” of kindergarten to the most abstruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand.

 – Jules Henry, Culture Against Man

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it... or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings – that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.

 – Gautama Buddha

 

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

– Malcolm Forbes

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.

 – Robert Frost

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

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

 – George Bernard Shaw

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.

– Mohammed

Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?

 – Ronald Reagan

Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.

 – John F. Kennedy

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

– Aristotle