Heather > Heather's Quotes

“The purpose of education is to save young people from the paralyzing effects of wealth and poverty. (more or less verbatim quote)”
― Kurt Hahn

“A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within.”
― Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

“We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart.”
― Sir Walter Scott

“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
― Margaret Mead

“I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.”
― Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

“There are few things more pathetic than those who have lost their curiosity and sense of adventure, and who no longer care to learn.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley, Way to Be!: 9 Ways To Be Happy And Make Something Of Your Life

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
― Richard Shaull, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
― Sir Walter Scott

“Books are better than television, the internet, or the computer for educating and maintaining freedom.
Books matter because they state ideas and then attempt to thoroughly prove them. They have an advantage precisely because they slow down the process, allowing the reader to internalize, respond, react and transform. The ideas in books matter because time is taken to establish truth, and because the reader must take the time to consider each idea and either accept it or, if he rejects it, to think through sound reasons for doing so. A nation of people who write and read is a nation with the attention span to earn an education and free society if they choose.”
― Oliver DeMille

“What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell

“Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. ”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

“The working class had imposed upon them a sterile and authoritarian educational system which mirrored the ethos of the corporate workplace.”
― Anthony M. Platt

“The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”
― Malcolm S. Forbes

“What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.”
― Maria Montessori

“[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.
Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and
compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it
instead into meek subservience to authority.”
― Walter Karp

“In the end, it's not what we keep our children from that will save them. It's what we put into them in the first place.”
― Marc Parent, Believing It All: Lessons I Learned from My Children

“Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.”
― Floyd Dell

“Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule”
― Donald A. Norman, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”
― Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions

“Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Heart, You Bully, You Punk

“...my object is to show that the chief function of the child--his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life--is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses...”
― Charlotte Mason

“Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children['s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don't understand.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Leaders are not, as we are often led to think, people who go along with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see, whether anyone is following them. "Leadership qualities" are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. They include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, stubbornness, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head, even when things are going badly. True leaders, in short, do not make people into followers, but into other leaders.”
― John Holt , Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book Of Homeschooling