Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
—W.H. Auden, 1947Quotes
Repetition is the mother of education.
—Jean Paul, 1807The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
—John Updike, 1963In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
—Mark Twain, 1897Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.
—Ezra Pound, 1934The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
—George Santayana, 1905My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg, 1981A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.
—Herodotus, c. 440 BCAll that we know is nothing can be known.
—Lord Byron, 1812Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.
—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BCIt is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
—Frederick Douglass, 1852It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.
—Erasmus, 1518