Education

I am neither man nor woman. I am neither brute nor human -- I'm a scholar!
~ William Foxwell (W.F.) Albright, quoted in Biographical Memoirs: Volume 91 (2009). William Foxwell Albright

Gripping and enduring interests frequently, and in respect of the higher interests almost always, grow out of initial learning efforts that are not intrinsically appealing or attractive.
~ William Chandler Bagley, in Journal of the National Education Association 30, no. 7 (October 1941).

If you wish to be applauded at an educational convention, vociferate sentimental platitudes about the sacred rights of the child, specifying particularly his right to happiness gained through freedom.
~ William Chandler Bagley, in Educational Administration and Supervision (September 1935). Is Subject-Matter Obsolete?

There is a tremendous dissatisfaction with public education -- an almost desperate resolve on the part of many people. They say that these are their children, and these are their few years in their one life on this earth; we're not going to let them lose their souls, or become uneducated, or pick up the terribly adverse cultural influences which are found in public education. There is a recognition that the moral atmosphere is very, very bad.
~ William Bentley Ball, in The Catholic World Report (Interview; August/September 1995)

The fruits of the earth do not more obviously require labour and cultivation to prepare them for our use and subsistence, than our faculties demand instruction and regulation, in order to qualify us to become upright and valuable members of society, useful to others, or happy in ourselves.
~ William Barrow, An Essay on Education, Volume 1 (1802). Chapter I: On the Importance and Necessity of a Right Education

Education is, after all, a serious business. Its lifeblood is standards. If there are no standards, how do we call something higher education?
~ William John Bennett, Speech at the University of Notre Dame (1 October 1990).

Most certification today is pure "credentialism." [It] must begin to reflect our demand for excellence, not our appreciation of parchment.
~ William John Bennett, in The New York Times (3 September 1986).

The act of sex involves deep springs of conduct. It is serious. It has complicated and profound repercussions. And if we're going to deal with it in school, we'd better know this and acknowledge it. Otherwise, we should not let our schools have anything to do with it. To make sex out to be something less powerful than it is, as our present sex-ed programs usually do, is just as much a dodge as denying the importance of sex. We serve children neither by denying their sexuality nor by making it a thing of no moral account.
~ William John Bennett, in National Review (3 July 1987). Why Johnny Can't Abstain

The essence of education is, in the words of one philosopher, the transmission of civilization -- the imparting of ideals as well as knowledge, the cultivation of the ability to distinguish the true and good from their counterfeits, and the wisdom to prefer the former to the latter.
~ William John Bennett, Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth about America's Top Schools (2001 edition). Introduction

[The shortage of student loans] may require ... divestiture of certain sorts -- stereo divestiture, automobile divestiture, three-weeks-at-the-beach divestiture.
~ William John Bennett, in The New York Times (12 February 1985).

We desperately need to recover a sense of the fundamental purpose of education, which is to engage in the architecture of souls.
~ William John Bennett, in Education Week (7 April 1993). Is Our Culture in Decline?

But to go to school in a summer morn,
Oh, it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day --
In sighing and dismay.
~ William Blake, from Songs of Experience (1794). The Schoolboy

Leisure may prove to be a curse rather than a blessing, unless education teaches a flippant world that leisure is not a synonym for entertainment.
~ William J. Bogan

The grand purpose of all education is the improvement of the mind, the refinement of the feelings, and the cultivation and development of the highest and most exalted virtues in the heart and life.
~ William Oland Bourne, Gems From Fable-Land: A Collection Of Fables Illustrated By Facts (1853). Preface

Schools cannot expect their students to learn the lessons of good citizenship when the school authorities themselves disregard the fundamental principles underpinning our constitutional freedoms.
~ William Joseph Brennan, Jr. (dissenting opinion), Doe v. Renfrow, 451 U.S. 1022 (1981).

It's an insane tragedy that 700,000 people get a diploma each year and can't read the damned diploma.
~ William E. Brock III, quoted in The New York Times (14 January 1987).

[O]ne of the most striking characteristics of our progressive education system is the obscurity of its aims and objectives.
~ William Brooks, The History and Social Science Teacher (1975). Some Reflections on Canadian Education

The development of appropriate educational policy can be crucial to the well-being of a society. Policy developers should not become unwitting slaves to other men's ideas especially when those ideas may become destructive of the goals and purposes of the very societies they seek to serve. ... Before change and a shift to more appropriate policy is possible, the slaves [to current education idealogy] must be set free.
~ William Brooks, in The St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning (January 1994). Was Dewey a Marxist?

The educational community should never surrender its right to dissent and raise questions about the nature of our culture. The longing to play a role in the development of a good and just society remains one of the highest and most valuable motivations of the teacher. But in the shadow of so many twentieth century societies that have been fractured, vulgarized and impoverished by Marxist ideology, it may be time to begin a more open discourse about the sources of thought that set the agenda for our schools.
~ William Brooks, in The St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning (January 1994). Was Dewey a Marxist?

A college education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.
~ William Lowe Bryan

I am for those who see our University as it is with all its wrinkles and scars, and who therefore also know it at its best -- its resolute integrity, its unworded oath of allegiance to the whole truth, its century of path-making for the children of the wilderness toward the fullness of civilized life, its passion for a clean and just democracy.
~ William Lowe Bryan, Speech at Indiana University (1916). Patriotism for Indiana

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

You haven't had your education yet.
~ William S. Burroughs, from My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995).

Benevolence is short-sighted, indeed, and must blame itself for failure, if it do not see in education the chief interest of the human race.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), from The Works of William E. Channing, D.D., Volume I (1841). Remarks on Education (originally in the Christian Examiner; November 1833)

[T]he ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. ... He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures, Boston MA (September 1838). On Self-Culture

Their school was Nature and their teacher God.
~ William Cliffton, in Poems, Chiefly Occasional (1800). Epistle To W. Gifford, Esq.

School days, school days; dear old golden rule days.
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic; taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick.
~ Will D. Cobb, School Days (1907 song lyric)

But all they want to do
Is tie the poem to a chair with rope
And torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.
~ Billy Collins, in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001). Introduction to Poetry

Ay 'tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an university: but the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.
~ William Congreve, Love for Love (1695). Act V, scene iii

Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.
~ William Johnson (Cory), in Eton Reform (1861).

And I was a physical education major with a child psychology minor at Temple, which means if you ask me a question about a child's behavior, I will advise you to tell the child to take a lap.
~ Bill Cosby, Fatherhood (1986). Chapter 2

For public schools 'tis public folly feeds.
~ William Cowper, Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools (1784).

In colleges and halls, in ancient days,
When learning, virtue, piety, and truth
Were precious, and inculcated with care,
There dwelt a sage call'd Discipline.
~ William Cowper, The Task (1785). Book II. The Time-Piece

The sounding jargon of the schools.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). Truth

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.
~ George William Curtis

The three R's -- reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic.
~ Sir William Curtis, Attributed, in a toast made at a dinner given for the Board of Education, London England (1795).

This town being the only seat of learning immediately under the patronage of the public, possessing the advantages of a central situation, on some of the most public roads in the state, in a plentiful country and excelled by few places in the world either for beauty of situation or salubrity of air, promises with all moral certainty to be a place of growing and permanent importance.
~ William Richardson Davie, in the North Carolina Journal (25 September 1793; letter describing the site of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
~ (William) Robertson Davies, World of Wonders (1975).

The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue -- questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.
~ William Orville Douglas, An Almanac of Liberty (1954).

In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey.
~ William Duane, in the Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (1822).

A system of education is not one thing, nor does it have a single definite object, nor is it a mere matter of schools. Education is that whole system of human training, within and without the school house walls, which molds and develops men.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, in The Negro Problem (1903). The Talented Tenth

Education must not simply teach work -- it must teach Life.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, in The Negro Problem (1903). The Talented Tenth

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Chapter V. Of the Wings of Atalanta

The truly educated man is he who has learned in school how to study and in life what to study.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, Paper delivered before School-teachers in Athens GA (1900). Postgraduate Work in Sociology in Atlanta University

Graduate students are petrified. As an undergraduate you say what's on your mind, you rap with the teacher. But in graduate school you pronounce yourself a professional -- this is what you do for a living. You're petrified to be wrong.
~ David William Duchovny, Playboy Interview: David Duchovny (December 1998).

[E]ducation is the transmission of civilization.
~ William James "Will" Durant (with Ariel Durant), The Lessons of History (1968).

He had been rejected from military service. He had weak ribs. He had poor eyes. He was flatfooted. He was a professor.
~ William James "Will" Durant

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
~ William James "Will" Durant, in Time Magazine (13 August 1965). The Essence of the Centuries

To educate -- that is, to train in habits of industry, economy, and forethought, to impart knowledge, and to inspire longings for improvement and excellence, is the true way to promote the happiness of a people.
~ William Ellis, Progressive Lessons In Social Science (1850).

All good school-work ought ... to reach the parents through the children, particularly in the lessons on hygiene, co-operation, manners, and ethics.
~ Charles William Eliot, in The Children's Educational Theatre (1911). Introduction

One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long.
~ Charles William Eliot

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.
~ Charles William Eliot, Presidential Inaugural Address, Harvard University (19 October 1869)

We have in America the largest public school system on earth. ... One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues.
~ William Herbert Perry Faunce

You can always tell a Harvard man -- but you can't tell him very much.
~ William Feather

Let each of us think of our own homes, of the villages in which we have to live, of the towns in which it is our lot to be busy; and do we not know child after child -- boys or girls -- growing up to probable crime, to still more probable misery, because badly taught or utterly untaught? Dare we, then, take on ourselves the responsibility of allowing this ignorance and this weakness to continue one year longer than we can help?
~ William Edward (W.E.) Forster, Speech introducing the Elementary Education Bill, House of Commons, Hansard (17 February 1870)

Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeoisie ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new socialist society.
~ William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America (1932).

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.
~ J. William Fulbright, Speech to the Council for International Education (1983).

It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation.
~ J. William Fulbright, Prospects for the West (1963).

But if we believe what we profess concerning the worth of the individual, then the idea of individual development within a framework of ethical purpose must become our deepest concern, our national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession. We must think of education as relevant for everyone everywhere -- at all ages and in all conditions of life.
~ John William Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
~ John William Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

[M]uch education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
~ John William Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individ­ual and the Innovative Society (1963).

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
~ John William Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individ­ual and the Innovative Society (1963).

The world is an incomparable classroom, and life is a memorable teacher for those who aren't afraid of her.
~ John William Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individ­ual and the Innovative Society (1963).

We don't even know what skills may be needed in the years ahead. That is why we must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change. That is why we must give them the critical qualities of mind and durable qualities of character that will serve them in circumstances we cannot now even predict.
~ John William Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

There are as many fools at a university as anywhere. ... But their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp -- the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.
~ William Alexander Gerhardie, The Polyglots (1925).

I was not conscious that I was studying.
~ William Hamilton Gibson, Eye Spy: Afield with Nature Among Flowers and Animate Things (1897). A Naturalist's Boyhood

Man is to be trained chiefly by studying and by knowing man.
~ William Ewart Gladstone, Inaugural Address at the University of Edinburgh. Glasgow, Scotland (16 April 1860).

If we are to persuade all students to do quality work, we must involve them deeply in the process of evaluating their own work as they do it! This is concurrent evaluation.
~ William Glasser, M.D., The Quality School Teacher (1993).

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.
~ William Glasser, M.D., Schools Without Failure (1968).

Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.
~ William Glasser, M.D., Schools Without Failure (1968).

All education is despotism.
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797). Part I. Essay VII: Of Public and Private Education

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797). Part I. Essay XV: Of Choice In Reading

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.
~ William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Book VI. Chapter VIII. Of National Education

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797). Part I. Essay IX: Of the Communication of Knowledge

Refer them to reading, to conversation, to meditation; but teach them neither creeds nor catechisms, either moral or political.
~ William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).

The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness.
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797). Part I. Essay I: Of Awakening the Mind

In our presence is a culture that is out of control. Education is the cure.
~ William Herbert Gray III, (June 1991)

Education is not learning, but the training of the mind that it may learn.
~ William Withey Gull, in A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull, Volume 1 (1894).

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
~ Sir William John Haley

[E]mulation and the love of honor constitute the appropriate stimulus in education.
~ Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet, in Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1858-60). Volume I. Metaphysics. Appendix I.A. Fragment on Academical Honors

You cannot measure a love for learning
or a joy of knowledge
or a passion for life ...
You can't measure those things with a standardized test
but you can sure kill them.
~ Bill Harley, NPR commentary (June 2001).

Education is the preparation of the individual for reciprocal union with society -- the preparation of the individual so that he can help his fellow men and in turn receive and appropriate their help.
~ William Torrey Harris, The Psychology of Manual Training (1889).

Education makes one an articulate member of the higher whole.
~ William Torrey Harris, Address Before the National Education Association, Buffalo NY (7 July 1886).

Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in every civilized nation are automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual under his species.
~ William Torrey Harris, Lectures on The Philosophy of Education (1893). Lecture I. The Literature of Education (delivered 7 January 1893)

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. ... The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
~ William Torrey Harris (1889), quoted in The Tyranny of Government Schooling (1992).

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. ... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
~ William Torrey Harris, The Philosophy of Education (1889).

[A]ll uneducated people are hypocrites.
~ William Hazlitt, Table-Talk, or Original Essays on Men and Manners, 2nd series (1824). On the Knowledge of Character

Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
~ William Hazlitt, Table-Talk; or, Original Essays, Volume II (1821-1822). Essay VIII. On the Ignorance of the Learned

Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.
~ William Hazlitt, from The Round Table, Vol. I (1817). On Classical Education

Education is the art of making men ethical.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821). Section 151

Many of the new critics [of liberal-arts education] have a hostile view of traditional scholarship and seem to judge ideas by their "political correctness" -- that is, on the basis of whom they may offend.
~ William A. Henry, (1 April 1991).

Inevitably many students of limited talent spend huge amounts of time and money pursuing some brass ring occupation, only to see their dreams denied. As a society we consider it cruel not to give them every chance at success. It may be more cruel to let them go on fooling themselves.
~ William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (1994). The Museum of Clear Ideas

There will be no educational reform until there is a connection between how well the children do and the incentives which drive the educational establishment.
~ William J. Hume

The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, in Cambridge Essays on Education (1917). The Training of the Reason

The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean (1931).

Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). VIII. The Laws of Habit

Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). IV. Education and Behavior

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.
~ William James, in The Popular Science Monthly (February 1887). The Laws of Habit

Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university, where a few undisciplinables ... may be infinitely more precious than a faculty-full of orderly routinists.
~ William James, in Memories and Studies (1911). V. Thomas Davidson: A Knight-Errant Of The Intellectual Life.

Our education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities of reaction, acquired at home, at school, or in the training of affairs.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). VI. Native Reactions and Acquired Reactions

The best claim that a college education can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can aspire to accomplish for you, is this: that it should help you to know a good man when you see him.
~ William James, Address Delivered at a Meeting of the Association of American Alumni at Radcliff College (7 November 1907). The Social Value of the College-Bred

The aim of 'Science' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a cease-less compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors.
~ William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Vol. 2. Chapter XIX: The Perception Of 'Things'

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
~ William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Vol. 1. Chapter IV. Habit

[T]he process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). XIII. The Acquisition of Ideas

If I had my way, I would have the Book of Genesis taught in all our elementary schools.
~ Bill Keith, Address in Monroe, LA (1986).

[T]he starting point in all education -- the crux of the educational process -- is individual interest; further, that the best and the richest kind of education starts with this self-propelled interest.
~ William Heard Kilpatrick, in William Heard Kilpatrick: Trail Blazer in Education (1951).

It is tiresome to hear education discussed, tiresome to educate, and tiresome to be educated.
~ William Lamb (2nd Viscount, Lord Melbourne)

Others are musing, in cogitation profound, on the arrangement of a syllogism, while they ought to be guiding the tail of a plow.
~ William Livingston, A Letter to the Right Reverend Father in God, John, Lord Bishop of Landaff (1768).

One of the unfortunate things about our education system is that we do not teach students how to avail themselves of their subconscious capabilities.
~ William P. ("Bill") Lear

Education is not concerned primarily with intellectual luxuries, but with elements which make the individual a valuable member of society.
~ William Mather Lewis

The importance of the education of the workforce has been taken way too far. In other words, education is not the way out of the poverty trap. A high education level is no guarantee of high productivity. The truth of the matter is that regardless of institutional educational level, workers around the world can be adequately trained on the job for high productivity.
~ William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability (2004). Prologue

I don't think anybody anywhere can talk about the future of their people or of an organization without talking about education. Whoever controls the education of our children controls our future.
~ Wilma Mankiller, (1987)

Wash your hands always before you come to school.
~ William Mather, The Young Man's Companion: Or, Arithemetick Made Easy (1681).

One of the chief defects in our plan of education in this country is that we give too much attention to developing the memory and too little to developing the mind; we lay too much stress on acquiring knowledge and too little on the wide application of knowledge.
~ William James Mayo, M.D., Collected Papers Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation (1933). The economic relation of the university system to the development of a social democracy.

The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people.
~ Peter McWilliams, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do (1998). Part V: What To Do? Education, Not Legislation

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1888). Things the Germans Lack

Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought -- they themselves no longer think.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The educational system in large states will always be mediocre at best, for the same reason that the cooking in large kitchens is at best mediocre.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878).

To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? Seek zeros!
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1888). Maxims and Arrows

A great university has a dual function, to teach and to think.
~ William Osler, Address at McGill Medical School (1 October 1894). Teaching and Thinking

[E]ducation is a life-long process, in which the student can only make a beginning during his college course.
~ William Osler, Address at McGill College, Montreal (1899). After Twenty-Five Years

Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study than a student.
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

Perfect happiness for student and teacher will come with the abolition of examinations, which are stumbling blocks and rocks of offence in the pathway of the true student.
~ William Osler, Address at McGill College, Montreal (1899). After Twenty-Five Years

[T]he education of the heart — the moral side of the man — must keep pace with the education of the head.
~ William Osler, Address, Centennial Celebration of the New Haven Medical Society, New Haven CT (6 January 1903). On the Educational Value of the Medical Society

The higher education so much needed today is not given in the schools, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.
~ William Osler, Address at the Dedication of the New Building of the Boston Medical Library (12 January 1901).

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
~ William Osler, Address delivered at the College of Medicine and Surgury, University of Minnesota (4 October 1892). Teacher and Student

The student often resembles the poet -- he is born, not made.
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

The student who is worrying about his future, anxious over the examinations, doubting his fitness for the profession, is certain not to do so well as the man who cares for nothing but the matter in hand, and who knows not whither he is going!
~ William Osler, Address at McGill College, Montreal (1899). After Twenty-Five Years

What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught -- both are in the same class, the one a little more advanced than the other.
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
~ Judge William R. Overton, (overturning Arkansas Act 590, requiring public schools to teach Creation Science).

Education means ... a leading or drawing out of every human faculty.
~ William Ordway Partridge, Art For America (1894). The True Education and the False

Archaeology, -- the knowledge of how man has acquired his present position and powers -- is one of the widest studies, best fitted to open the mind, and to produce that type of wide interests and toleration which is the highest result of education.
~ William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904). Preface

Advanced education may or may not make men and women more efficient; but it enriches personality, increases the wealth of the mind, and hence brings happiness.
~ William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps, Happiness (August 1927).

We really need not less but more idealism -- instead of trimming the ideal to suit human convenience, we ought to elevate conduct to conform somewhat more closely to the model.
~ William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps, Scribner's Magazine, Volume LXXII (July-December 1922). As I Like It (Department)

I want to lay particular stress on the point that the competition to be valuable should be between teams and not individuals. ... It is a very inspiring thing in itself to form part of such a large body working harmoniously to achieve a great end.
~ William Lowell Putnam, in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine (December 1921). A Suggestion For Increasing The Undergraduate Interest In Studies

Unlike university or public libraries, elementary and secondary school libraries are not designed for freewheeling inquiry; they are tailored ... to the teaching of basic skills and ideas ...
~ William H. Rehnquist (dissenting opinion), Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982).

Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.
~ Frederick William (F.W.) Robertson

[I]t should not come as a shock to discover that the intellectual or "educated" man can be more harmful to society than the uneducated or unsophisticated man. The literate person has the ability to spread his ignorance abroad, to sell his dogma wholesale. The unlettered person can only pass on his beliefs to those in his immediate vicinity.
~ Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (1972).

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. 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.
~ Will Rogers, in Will Rogers' Daily Telegrams: Volume II: The Hoover Years, 1929-1931 (1978).

The schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
~ Will Rogers

There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
~ Will Rogers

There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that is education. ... Some say, what is the salvation of the movies? I say, run 'em backward. It can't hurt 'em and it's worth a trial.
~ Will Rogers, in The Autobiography of Will Rogers (1949). Chapter 6

The defense against a bad idea is a better idea; the defense against a half truth is a truth; the defense against propaganda is education; and it is in education that democracies must place their trust.
~ William F. Russell, from School and Society, Volume 50 (1939).

I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun.
~ Willy Russell

Public schools promote civic rather than individual pursuits. ... We must focus on creating citizens for the good of society. ... Each child belongs to the state.
~ William H. Seawell, (1981)

The whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
~ William Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act II, scene vii

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot,
Or found a mind I did not doubt,
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
~ William De Witt (W.D.) Snodgrass, Heart's Needle (1959). April Inventory

They wear their godhead lightly.
They look out from their hill and say,
To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down;
The great destination is to stay."
~ William De Witt (W.D.) Snodgrass, from Selected Poems 1957-1987 (1987). The Campus on the Hill

Outcomes-based education means clearly focusing and organizing everything in an educational system around what is essential for all students to be able to do successfully at the end of their learning experiences. This means starting with a clear picture of what is important for students to be able to do, then organizing the curriculum, instruction and assessment to make sure this learning ultimately happens.
~ William G. Spady, Outcomes Based Education: Critical Issues and Answers (1994).

Our faith in the power of book learning is excessive and unfounded. It is a superstition of the age. The education which forms character and produces faith in sound principles of life comes through personal influence and example. It is borne on the mores.
~ William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906).

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.
~ William Temple (archbishop), The Hope of a New World (1941).

A university should literally be a "universe city", but most modern universities are bureaucratic structures which can only relate to the universe as it is experienced through their own bureaucratic procedures.
~ William Irwin Thompson, From Nation to Emanation: Planetary Culture and World Governance (1982).

Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income -- which he then spends sending his son to college.
~ William E. "Bill" Vaughan

[A]ll true education consists in the cultivation of the judgment.
~ William Walker, The Handbook of Drawing (1878). Preface

Education requires that we answer many questions. Continuing education requires that we question many of our answers.
~ William Arthur Ward

Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change.
Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.
~ William Arthur Ward

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own.
~ Bill Watterson, Speech at Kenyon College Commencement, Gambier, Ohio (20 May 1990). Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled

If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vim and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow.
~ William Allen White, Editorial in The Emporia Gazette (8 April 1932). Student Riots

In education we are striving not to teach youth to make a living, but to make a life.
~ William Allen White, in The Golden Book Magazine, Volume 11 (1930). William Allen White Talks to his Neighbors

Nothing should be overlooked in fighting for better education. Be persistent and ornery: this will be good for the lethargic educational establishment and will aid the whole cause of public education.
~ Roy Wilkins

In the 1940s a survey listed the top seven discipline problems in public schools: talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of line, wearing improper clothes, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. A more recent survey lists these top seven: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. (Arson, gang warfare, and venereal disease are also-rans).
~ George F. Will

Debates over assessments, vouchers, and federal, state, and local control are secondary to the real issues. Helping children achieve also requires a willingness to question whether today's classrooms are set up to meet children's individual needs as developing readers and writers.
~ Carmelita K. Williams, International Reading Association Press Release (26 January 2001). International Reading Association Welcomes Bush Administration's Proposed Debate on "Closing the Achievement Gap"

For various reasons, education is being driven towards an increasing concentration on the technical and the commercial, to a point at which any more reflective enquiry may come to seem unnecessary and archaic, something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.
~ Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Annual Lectures (2000). Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants.
~ Raymond Henry Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958).

So the civic responsibility of education is to teach us how to be a person for others. To be a person for others, we must learn how to serve the community. To be a person for others, we must learn how to sacrifice on behalf of the community. To be a person for others, we must learn how to suffer with others in the community. ... In summary, the civic responsibility of education teaches us to serve, sacrifice for, and suffer with people in community. And let me tell you a secret: There is no other route to personal success except this one.
~ Charles V. Willie, Address to Certificate Recipients at Harvard College, Cambridge MA (6 June 1996). The Civic Responsibility of Education Proclaimed

Classes and curricula are structured in such a way that faculty and students alike will remain as much strangers to one another when we leave the university as when we arrived.
~ William H. Willimon, in A Report to the President, and the Provost and the Vice President for Student Life of Duke University (1993). We Work Hard, We Play Hard

Education is the mother of leadership.
~ Wendell Lewis Willkie, Speech at Duke University, Durham NC (14 January 1943). Freedom and the Liberal Arts

Education is the apprenticeship of life.
~ Robert Eldridge Aris (R.A.) Willmott, Pleasures, Objects, And Advantages Of Literature (1851). VI. Objects and Limitations of this Discourse

In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity -- or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity -- by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
~ Angus Wilson, in The Guardian (30 September 1989).

Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?
~ Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). Chapter 2. The Great Branches of Learning

Educators everywhere must seek new ways to promote the idea that learning is something a student does with books and materials, and a teacher who cares; that learning can happen in college and outside; and that a student's intellectual growth depends far less on geography (which college) than on what advantage he takes of the opportunities which surround him wherever he is.
~ Eugene S. Wilson, quoted in Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine (April 1961). What's Going On in Schools and Colleges

[A]lthough it is not to be denied, that some eyes can be educated to a much greater extent than others, that can be no excuse for any one neglecting to educate his eye. The worse it is, the more it needs education; the better it is, the more it will repay it.
~ George Wilson, The Five Gateways of Knowledge (1856).

The university of the air.
~ Harold Wilson (an early term for the Open University), in Glasgove Herald (9 September 1963).

[L]et it never be forgotten by you that the reputation established by a boy at school and college, whether it be of merit or demerit, will follow him through life.
~ Martha Wilson, in The Women of the American Revolution, 3rd edition (1848). Letter, 16 February 1811

In my opinion, much of the so-called science of "education" was invented as a necessary mechanism for enabling semi-educated people to act as tolerable teachers.
~ Sloan Wilson

I consider the cause of education as the cause of my country; for the youth, who are now at their studies, will soon compose that country.
~ William Wirt, An Address Before the Peithessophian and Philoclean Societies of Rutgers College (20 July 1830).

[T]he Education, moral and intellectual, of every individual must be, chiefly, his own work.
~ William Wirt, An Address Before the Peithessophian and Philoclean Societies of Rutgers College (20 July 1830).

The only educators who matter now must embody an ethical component in academic life which students manifestly long for and rarely receive.
~ William H. Wisner, Whither the Postmodern Library? (2000). Chapter 1. The Winter of Knowledge

Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind?-- all the ways that kids interact with games -- that's the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. And I would argue that as the world becomes more complex, and as outcomes become less about success or failure, games are better at preparing you. The education system is going to realize this sooner or later. It's starting.
~ William Ralph ("Will") Wright, in The New Yorker magazine (6 November 2006). Game Master

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows,
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
~ William Butler Yeats, from The Wild Swans at Coole (1917). The Scholars (1929 version)

Education is not filling a pail, but lighting a fire.
~ William Butler Yeats

[W]e ought to be able to give the child of the poor as good an education as we give to the child of the rich.
~ William Butler Yeats, Speech Before The Senate of Ireland on the School Attendance Bill (24 March 1926).