Education quotes
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"It will be said that the joy of mental adventure must be rare, that there are few who can appreciate it, and that ordinary education can take no account of so aristocratic a good. I do not believe this. The joy of mental adventure is far commoner in the young than in grown men and women. ...It is rare in later life because everything is done to kill it during education."
"Figuring out how to think about the problem."
"The most important method of education always has consisted of that in which the pupil was urged to actual performance."
"I had the most beautiful set of theories you ever knew when I started out as a schoolma'am, but every one of them has failed me at some pinch or another."
"Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honorable is better. On such principles children and persons of every age which requires education should be trained."
"Inasmuch as every family is a part of a state, and these relationships are the parts of a family, and the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue of the whole, women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the constitution, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of the state. And they must make a difference: for the children grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a state are women."
"The art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the one hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hard coin without limit."
"The same things are best both for individuals and for states, and these are the things which the legislator ought to implant in the minds of his citizens."
"Youth should be kept strangers to all that is bad, and especially to things which suggest vice or hate. When the five years have passed away, during the two following years they must look on at the pursuits which they are hereafter to learn. There are two periods of life with reference to which education has to be divided, from seven to the age of puberty, and onwards to the age of one and twenty."
"Knowledge exists to be imparted."
"...the science of calculation also is indispensable as far as the extraction of the square and cube roots: Algebra as far as the quadratic equation and the use of logarithms are often of value in ordinary cases: but all beyond these is but a luxury; a delicious luxury indeed; but not be in indulged in by one who is to have a profession to follow for his subsistence."
"The aim of university education should be to turn out true servants of the people who will live and die for the country's freedom."
"You can finish school, and even make it easy - but you never finish your education, and it's seldom easy."
"An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be."
"I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head."
"What the teachers digest, the pupils eat."
"Is it too ingenuous to imagine that anything can be left to say about a garden? Garden literature, descriptive, reminiscent, and technical, has blossomed so profusely among us during the last decade, that he should be an expert indeed who ventures to add thereto."
"... the yearly expenses of the existing religious systemexceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?"
"The gains in education are never really lost. Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth, like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men."
"The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything."
