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Education
- "I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates a climate. My daily mood makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be the tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor. Hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized."
- "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
- "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
- "I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race."
- "We must encourage [each other] -- once we have grasped the basic points -- to interconnecting everything else on our own, to use memory to guide our original thinking, and to accept what someone else says as a starting point, a seed to be nourished and grow. For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting -- no more -- and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind."
- "The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
- "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living."
- "Education would be much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every student should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it."
- "Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
- "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."
- "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
- "Education is a subversive activity that the reason so little of it is going on."
- "I can't help but feel that this has been a waste of four years of my life and thousands of dollars of my parents' money. I think I would have been better off with an annotated bibliography and a library card."
- Alec Campbell (University of Toronto, class of 2002)
- "I know, (there is) no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of society, but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
- "Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin ... the great equalizer of the conditions of men - the balance-wheel of the social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor."
- "Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
- "Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
- "Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education."
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