School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn't worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave. This was a Catholic School in Munich. I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system? From the age of twelve, I began to suspect authority and distrust teachers.

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

Aristotle
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Carl Sagan
You go talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, "What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?"

These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them.

You go talk to 12th graders and there's none of that. They've become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade.

Epictetus
Only the educated are free.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Hunter S. Thompson
Create a place for people to live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bullshit concept of progress that is driving us all mad.

Isaac Asimov
Education isn’t something you can finish.

Jidda Krishnamurti
The whole movement of life is learning. There is never a time in which there is no learning. Every action is a movement of learning and every relationship is a learning.

Education is not only learning from books, memorizing some facts, but also learning how to look, how to look at what the books are saying, whether they are saying something true or false.

John Stuart Mill
The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.

Leonardo da Vinci
Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.

Mahatma Gandhi
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mark Twain
Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

Michel Foucault
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions - to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

Oscar Wilde
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Plato
We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.

Richard Feynman
Students don't need a perfect teacher. Students need a happy teacher, who's gonna make them excited to come to school and grow a love for learning.

Rumi
You can beat 40 scholars with one fact, but you can't beat one idiot with 40 facts.

Seneca
Finally, it is generally agreed that no activity can be
successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied - not rhetoric or liberal studies - since the mind, when distracted, absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.

Leisure without study is death, a tomb for the living person.

Retire into yourself as much as possible. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one. People learn as they teach.

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Socrates
I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

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Other Voices

For these sections without caricature the quote comes first, the cited person after. In case you are using text-to-speech be aware.

The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.
Alexandra K. Trenfor

Obsoledge... the amount of obsolete knowledge that we have — and that we teach — is greater and greater and greater.
Alvin Toffler

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B.F. Skinner

Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
Bruce Lee

Peace has never come from dropping bombs. Real peace comes from enlightenment and educating people to behave more in a divine manner.
Carlos Santana

…the connections that enable us
to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.
George Siemens

Much learning does not teach understanding.
Heraclitus

If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”
John Dewey

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.
John Locke

In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not their poets.
Jonas Mekas

The true purpose of arts education is not necessarily to create more professional dancers or artists. {It’s} to create more complete human beings who are critical thinkers, who have curious minds, who can lead productive lives.
Kelly Pollock

It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.
L.R. Knost

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Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead

If each person has natural gifts and innate talents, then the true nature of education must involve the awakening, inviting, and blessing of the inner genius and unique life spirit of each young person.
Michael Meade

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
Norman Douglas

We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is teaching people how to learn.
Peter Drucker

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
Plutarch

It is only the ignorant who despise education.
Publilius Syrus

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost

No people will tamely surrender their liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the contrary, when people are universally ignorant, and debauched in their manners, they will sink under their own weight without the aid of foreign invaders.
Samuel Adams

I couldn’t see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.

The gardener cannot make a plant grow. The plant grows itself. What the gardener does is provide conditions for growth. And great gardeners know what the conditions are bad ones don’t. Great teachers know what the conditions for growth are and the bad ones don’t.
Sir Ken Robinson

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson

If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.
Zig Ziglar

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