Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

The 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. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

The 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.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.