Wisdom on the Topic of education
Quotations
Investing in other people's children
All of the great advances in our society have come when we have made investments in other people’s children.
Conscious Improvement for the Masses
In the newly created Germany, Otto von Bismarck set up the world’s first social insurance system for the working classes in the late nineteenth century. Britian followed suit under Lloyd George in the early twentieth century. America distributed small parcels of freeholdings to first-comers in the feverish westwards push that came after the Civil War. Had America instead chosen to auction the undivided land to the highest bidders, the US would now have a Latin America-style hacienda economy. The railroad barons would have gobbled up most of the land and converted it into vast estates. America also made public land grants to set up new universities across its rapidly opening landscape. Each of the big Western countries consciously opted to spread skills and assets to its poor. For the first time in history, governments exended public education, moving the school leaving age upwards as the factory clock supplanted the farm day as the timekeeper of the new age. The gilded age was an era of spectacular new wealth. It was also a time of conscious improvement for the masses. They were no longer unlettered. As China and India are discovering, the rise of mass literacy changes everything. Though the Towntrees and the Carnegies became richer than God, their workers could read and write.
Cost of Education
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Defending the pursuit of learning
If the pursuit of learning is not defended by the educated citizen, it will not be defended at all. For there will always be those who scoff at intellectuals, who cry out against research, who seek to limit our educational system. Modern cynics and skeptics see no more reason for landing a man on the moon, which we shall do, than the cynics and skeptics of half a millennium ago saw for the discovery of this country. They see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
But the educated citizen knows how much more there is to know. He knows that “knowledge is power,” more so today than ever before. He knows that only an educated and informed people will be a free people, that the ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all, and that if we can, as Jefferson put it, “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” And, therefore, the educated citizen has a special obligation to encourage the pursuit of learning, to promote exploration of the unknown, to preserve the freedom of inquiry, to support the advancement of research, and to assist at every level of government the improvement of education for all Americans, from grade school to graduate school.
The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance
The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened…. There is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.
Hands that must work
We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.
Ignorant and Free
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.
I must study politics and war
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Intelligence plus Character
We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Learning from Experience
The most powerful learning comes from direct experience. But what happens when we can no longer observe the consequences of our actions? Herein lies the core learning dilemma that confronts organizations: we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions. The most critical decisions made in organizations have systemwide consequences that stretch over years or decades.
Learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Life is a series of daring adventures from a secure base
Human development research offers a different formula: All of life is a series of daring adventures from a secure base. If government can create a framework in which people grow up amid healthy families, nurturing schools, thick communities and a secure safety net, then they will have the resources and audacity to thrive in a free global economy and a diversifying skills economy.
The Opposite of Popularizing Economics
This is why this book is my attempt to do the opposite of popularizing economics: if it succeeds, it should incite its readers to take the economy into their own hands and make them realize that to understand the economy they also have to understand why the self-appointed experts on the economy, the economists, are almost always wrong. Ensuring that everyone is allowed to talk authoritatively about the economy is a prerequisite for a good society and a precondition for an authentic democracy. The economy’s ups and downs determine our lives; its forces make a mockery of our democracies; its tentacles reach deep into our souls, where they shape our hopes and aspirations. If we defer to the experts on the economy, we effectively hand them all decisions that matter.
Preparing Managers to Manage
The time has come to recognize that higher education in management rests on a fatal fallacy. The idea behind the contemporary business school is that preparing future business managers means training them in a discipline called Business Management. After 100 years of fruitless attempts to produce such a discipline, it should be clear that it does not exist. Preparing managers to manage, in fact, is not different from preparing people to live in a civilized world. Managers do not need to be trained; they need to be educated. And for that purpose, although a certain amount of study of business-related subjects may prove useful, the business schools as they are presently constituted are at best superfluous.
Prime training for permanent underclasses
Look again at [what I consider to be] the seven lessons of school teaching: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance. All of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius.
Quality Matters
Quality matters, and much of the evidence suggests that while developing countries are encouraging and fostering meritocracy, their Western rivals are increasingly approaching academe with an egalitarian flare – more access (of course, with the benefit of widening educational opportunity) even if at the expense of quality.
Quality of Children vs. Quantity
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
Relieving Ignorance
“Customer satisfaction” is a good way to sell shoes; but it is a bad way to relieve ignorance. It is fundamentally stupid to base the content of an education on what the as-yet uneducated person decides is best.
Ten Commandments for Teachers
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
To differentiate truth from falsehood
It is the civic responsibility of all of us to check the facts we read or hear, to find and depend upon reliable sources, to share the truth with others, and hold accountable those who lie to us or suppress the truth.
We must also ensure that every American has sufficient education to differentiate truth from falsehood, and to think critically about what they read and see.
To save man from the morass of propaganda
Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
The US remains astonishingly backward when it comes to education
It’s an unfortunate fact that the United States remains astonishingly backward compared to almost all other advanced Western countries when it comes to education, because in America, what predicts how well a child will do in school is not a child’s aptitude or hard work, but the status of the child’s parents – which is to say, their own levels of education and wealth. Other countries suffer from this condition too, but the United States is especially anachronistic. And it’s getting worse: The influence of this wealth predictor in the United States today has only been growing stronger in recent years.
You can simply focus on raising a human being
Imagine, then, what it’s like to be a Nordic parent. You can simply focus on raising a human being, in an age-appropriate way at every stage, without ever once feeling guilty that you’re not saving enough money, or not making enough money, to secure them the college education they’ll need to avoid ending up in the gutter.