Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
– Oscar Wilde
In England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
– Oscar Wilde
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
– Henry Adams
Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
– Sir William Haley
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
– James Baldwin
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
– Galileo
It is almost a miracle that modern teaching methods have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for what this delicate little plant needs more than anything, besides stimulation, is freedom.
– Albert Einstein
If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water. On dry land, no frame of mind is ever going to help you.
– Bruce Lee
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
– Mark Twain
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
– René Descartes
You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
– Marie Curie
The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”
– Maria Montessori
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
– Aristotle
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
– Will Durant
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
– Albert Einstein
Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
– John Dewey
A mark or grade is an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an indefinite amount of material.
– Paul Dressel
Everyone is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
– (attributed to) Albert Einstein
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
– Ernest Renan
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
– Carl Sagan
Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.
– Sir Claus Moser
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
– Frederick Douglass
We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Only the educated are free.
– Epictetus
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
– Nelson Mandela
The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
– Ernest Dimnet
The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated–quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.
– Abraham Lincoln
…classroom teaching … is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented. ..The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity would be in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster.
– Lee S. Shulman in Wisdom of Practice
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
– George W. Bush
The Urban Science Teacher 