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Today’s child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules.
The object of a liberal training is not learning, but discipline and the enlightenment of the mind. The educated man is to be discovered by his point of view, by the temper of his mind, by hit attitude towards life and his fair way of thinking. He can see, he can discriminate, he can combine ideas and perceieve whither they lead; he has insight and comprehension. His mind is a pracised instrument of appreciation. He is more apt to contribute light than heat to a discussion, and will oftener than another show the power of uniting the elements of a difficult subject in a whole view; he has the knowledge of the world which no one can have who knows only his own generation or only his own task.
What we should seek to impart in our colleges, therefore, is not so much learning itself as the spirit of learning. You can impart that to young men; and you can impart it to them in the three or four years at your disposal. It consists in the power to distinguish good reasoning from bad, in the power to digest and interpret evidence, in a habit of catholic observation and a preference for the non-partisan point of view, in an addiction to clear and logical prcesses of thought and yet and instinctive desire to interpret rather than to stick in the letter of the reasoning, in a taste for knowledge and a deep respect for the integrity of the human mind. It is citizenship of the world of knowledge, but not ownership of it.
What we should seek to impart in our colleges, therefore, is not so much learning itself as the spirit of learning. You can impart that to young men; and you can impart it to them in the three or four years at your disposal. It consists in the power to distinguish good reasoning from bad, in the power to digest and interpret evidence, in a habit of catholic observation and a preference for the non-partisan point of view, in an addiction to clear and logical prcesses of thought and yet and instinctive desire to interpret rather than to stick in the letter of the reasoning, in a taste for knowledge and a deep respect for the integrity of the human mind. It is citizenship of the world of knowledge, but not ownership of it.
Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
Book: The Once and Future King
dansmind86 /
education, evolution, humanity, learning, life, mankind, religion, science, truth
#2997
All truth is one. In this light may science and religion endeavor here for the
steady evolution of mankind. From darkness to light, from narrowness to
broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance, it is the voice of life, which
calls us to come and learn.
steady evolution of mankind. From darkness to light, from narrowness to
broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance, it is the voice of life, which
calls us to come and learn.
That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.
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.
The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.
All people should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
I have lived and will always live, my life as it can be lived at its best, with art, music, poetry, literature, science, philosophy, and thought. I shall know the keener people of this world, think the keener thoughts, and taste the keener pleasures, as long as I can and as much as I can. That’s the real practical use of self-education and self-culture. It converts a world which is only a good world for those who can win at its ruthless game into a world good for all of us. Your education is the only thing that nothing can take from you in this life.
Book: The Independent Scholar’s Handbook
All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
Live as if you will die tomorrow but learn as if you will live forever.
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dansmind86 /
education, individuality, minds, thinking, uniqueness, youth
#2832
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.
An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living and doesn’t teach them how to live.
…I simply did not recognize the extent to which the 1960s “youth revolution” had terrified our ruling Elite, or that they would try to prevent future upsurges of radical Utopianism by deliberately “dumbing down” the educational system. What they have produced, the so-called Generation X, must rank as not only the most ignorant but also the must paranoid and depressive kids ever to infest our Republic. I agree with outlaw radio staw Travis Hipp that the paranoia and depression result inevitably from the ignorance. These kids not only don’t know anything; they don’t even want to know. They only realize, vaguely, that somebody has screwed them out of something, but they don’t have enough zest or bile to try to find out who screwed them and what they were screwed out of.
Book: Prometheus Rising
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
The deeper one enters into the study of Nature, the further one ventures into and along the by-paths that, like a mystic maze, thread Nature’s realm in every direction, the broader and grander becomes the vista opened up to the view.
Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
The big difference between Europe and America is the proportion of people who come out of the [education] system really not being functional for any serious role. In Finland that is maybe 2-3%. In Europe in general maybe 15 or 20%. For the United States at least 30%, maybe more. In spite of all the press, Americans really don’t get the education difference. They generally still feel this is a well-educated country and workforce. They just don’t see how far the country is falling behind.
Speech: University of California presentation
Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar…
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.
A novel is, alas— for better or worse, a function of experience and maturity. Why are there almost no good novels written by people in their early twenties or in their teens? There are almost none. It’s one of the great problems of teaching writing to young people— you find talented young people, eighteen or nineteen years old; you try to teach them some skills; you try to teach them some awareness, some craft and discipline. But you are also aware that you’re getting them all dressed up with no place to go for about ten years, because they’ve got to wait until they’ve settled into their own characters and into their own lives, until they know something in their lives; and then their good fiction, their good narrative, will begin to come out of them in their middle and late twenties— I believe often not until their late thirties.
Book: Conversations: Reynolds Price and William Ray -The MVC Bulletin, Memphis State University, Memphis, Tennessee, 1976
Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: “Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?”
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Time in life is short. You can only read so many books, so choose wisely.
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
Then they expect you to pick a career
Song: Working Class Hero
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.
Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas, and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
Book: The Once and Future King
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Moral education… ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.
Book: Brave New World
There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics.
Book: “Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, 1957 (p. 29)
We are sometimes told that only fanaticism can make a social group effective. I think this is totally contrary to the lessons of history. But, in any case, only those who slavishly worship success can think that effectiveness is admirable without regard to what is effected. For my part, I think it better to do a little good than to do much harm. The world that I should wish to see would be one freed from the virulence of group hostilities and capable of realizing that happiness for all is to be derived rather from co-operation than from strife. I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence. The world needs open hearts and open minds, and it is not through rigid systems, whether old or new, that these can be derived.
Book: “Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, 1957 (p. vii)
The point of teaching a course is to expose students to ideas and arguments that are new to them and to help them think critically about controversial issues. Nothing pleases teachers more than to see students craft their own, original arguments, based on solid evidence, that dispute the point of view presented in class lectures.
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Book: “Discourses” by Epictetus
The hacker class has an ambivalent relation to education. Hackers desire knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being through the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself.
Book: “A Hacker Manifesto” by McKenzie Wark, [055]
Those cosmetic drugs, she said, those mood equalizers and antidepressants, they only treat the symptoms of the bigger problem. Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language, she said, was just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can’t deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can’t be explained and understood.
Book: “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk, pgs 150-151
Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.
Book: Hogfather
To kindle a fire and leave it burning - that is the aim of all great teachers.
A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
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