Quotes on schooling and education

I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
--Petronius, Satyricon


My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
--George Bernard Shaw

My grandmother wanted me to get an education, so she kept me out of school.
--Margaret Mead

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
--Mark Twain


Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
--Isaac Asimov


Real education must ultimately be limited to one who insists on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
--Ezra Pound



In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
-- Nietzsche




Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
--Beatrix Potter




So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
--John Updike




It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coersion and a sense of duty.
--Albert Einstein

Education is what remains when you have forgotten everything you learned in school.
--Albert Einstein





color=seagreen]I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience.
-- Anne Sullivan

[