Quotes about Education

There are two most fundamental Great Principles in Reality Itself that are relevant and most essential for humankind.

The First Great Principle in Reality Itself is intrinsic egolessness (or no-"self").

The Second Great Principle in Reality Itself is subordinate only to the First Great Principle in Reality Itself.

The Second Great Principle in Reality Itself is prior unity (or no-"difference").

If you only try to do the things where you win, then you'll never try to do anything worth doing.

We cannot avoid responsibility -- each of us must say, "If children fail, it is MY finger those adoring eyes followed."

We are living in a period of tumult and change. We face new threats that will require more than new technologies. To defend freedom in the 21st century, you will have to bring innovation, flexibility, and agility to your posts.

Don't be afraid to think for yourself - to take risks, and try new things. You may meet resistance along the way - expect opposition - but don't be dissuaded. Progress in life has come generally from those who swim upstream.

Whatever new threats and challenges may emerge, our nation will be able to face them squarely, deal with them, and yet allow our people to continue to live free and unafraid. The decisions you make, the courage and creativity you bring to your responsibilities, will determine America's future. Liberty and our way of life are fragile gifts - their care is in your hands. We thank you for stepping forward to shoulder that immense responsibility. Your country is grateful, and proud of each of you.

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today."

What a great day it will be when schools have all the money they need and the army will have to hold a bake sale to buy bombs.

Governments would rather spend their money on another bomber than education, and why do we fear black men when every bit of suffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it?

Nothing in the matter-of-fact or finite order of experience is directly or obviously grounded in actual authoritative principles; phenomena do not permit us to see through them to their infinite preconditions, and certainly not even to comprehend or conceptualize what kinds of things those preconditions may be. It is only through holistic and variably stressed principles that we can see the formation or architectonics of finite realities, in accordance with those lawful and ordering forces. There is no empirical path to principles, no psychological route to values or ultimate duties or essential character: hundreds of millions of human beings may despair of not having "salvation" who do not and cannot ever comprehend what the issue even is, i.e. the onslaught of the finite order that threatens to make our ambiguously finite/infinite spirit into just another finite particle within the finite world. We have to be always carrying out our self-education dialectically, with one eye on each domain, the finite and the infinite, each of which demands its own peculiar modus of intelligence and insight from us.

"The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn."

The ladder of success we climb is not leaning against a building -- it is being held up by every person who ever loved us or taught us.

The entrepreneur builds an enterprise; the technician builds a job.

Most entrepreneurs enter into their self employment adventure with the education of an employee.

The Door of Success is opened with the "key of education". Education is found in many ways, and does not always include awards, certificates or degrees.

Thanks to Pixar University, employees learn to see the company's work (and their colleagues) in a new light. "The skills we develop are skills we need everywhere in the organization," Nelson said. "Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn't just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There's no company on earth that wouldn't benefit from having people become more observant."

That helps to explain why the Pixar University crest bears the Latin inscription, Alienus Non Diutius. Translation: alone no longer. "It's the heart of our model," Randy Nelson says, "giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together."

That’s not how most of Hollywood does it—which helps to explain why Pixar does so well. How are you changing the game in your field? What is your distinctive take on how your industry operates? Do you work as distinctively as you compete?

If you want one year of prosperity, plant corn.
If you want ten years of prosperity, plant trees.
If you want one hundred years of prosperity, educate people

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." By W.B. Yeats

I tried to change the author, but I couldn't figure out how. . .

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled.  All our difficulty comes with the others.  When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?  He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem.  We have to recondition him.  But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning.  They're all right already.  They'll believe anything." -Miss Hardcastle

"We want you to write it down--to camouflage it.  Only for the present, of course.  Once the thing gets going we shan't have to bother about the great heart of the British public.  We'll make the great heart what we want it to be.  But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put.  For instance, if it were even whispered that the N.IC.E. wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity.  Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to and end.  Odd thing it is--the word 'experiment' is unpopular, but not the word 'experimental.'  You must'nt experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct!"

"Man has got to take charge of Man....

Then real education, including pre-natal education.  By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense.  A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly:  whatever he or his parents try to do about it.  Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain...." -Lord Feverstone

Education is what you have after you have forgotten everything you learned in school.

"We are educating people out of their creative capacities".

I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."

(his son's Nativity play)...the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance.
If they don't know, they'll have a go.
Am I right?
They're not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Epilogue – Ecological Literacy – excerpt from page 297

Reconnecting with the web of life means building and nurturing sustainable communities in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of further generations. For this task we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals and microorganisms. To understand these lessons, we need to learn the basic principles of ecology. We need to become, as it were, ecologically literate. Being ecologically literate, or “ecoliterate,” means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (ecosystems) and using those principles creating sustainable human communities. We need to revitalize our communities – including our educational communities, business communities, and political communities – so that the principles of ecology become manifest in them as principles of education, management, and politics.

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

I believe this country stands at a crossroads. For decades, innovation has been the engine of prosperity in this country. Now, economic progress depends more than ever on innovation. And the potential for technology innovation to improve lives has never been greater.... If we make the right choices, the United States can remain the global innovation leader that it is today.

These four policy prescriptions – strengthening educational opportunities, revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, increasing federal funding for basic scientific research, and providing incentives for private-sector R&D – should in my view be top priorities as Congress and the Administration consider how to maintain the nation's leadership in science, technology, and innovation.

Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce.

I think the more you have a generalist perspective, I think sometimes the more you can kind of see through the forest and the trees. And when it gets a little bit cloudy, you know, have some sense of, "Well, maybe this might happen or maybe that might happen." So I really am a big believer in liberal arts education. I think it's better -- particularly in these kind of uncertain times -- to know a little bit about a lot of things as opposed to being expert in one thing.

To explain too much is to steal a person's opportunity to learn, and stealing is against the Law.

Academia was created by business, religion and government as an enclosure for intelligent, altruistic people to keep them occupied and feeling important, and distracted from exposing corruption and working for change.  Fortunately, this strategy hasn't always succeeded.

School is indeed training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.