Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.--E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (Cultural Literacy)

Character development is the great, if not the sole, aim of education.--O'Shea

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.--Carl Jung 

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.--Neil Postman

Citizens may be born free; they are not born wise. Therefore, the business of liberal education in a democracy is to make free men wise.--F. Champion Ward

Education consists of example and love--nothing else.--Heinrich Pestalozzi 

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.--G.M. Trevelyan

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

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.--Daniel J. Boorstin ("A Case of Hypochondria" Newsweek, July 6, 1970)

Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money--in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.--Bel Kaufman

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

Education is the mental railway, beginning at birth and running on to eternity. No hand can lay it in the right direction but the hand of a mother.--Mrs. H. O. Ward

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

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.--Pete Seeger

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.--Anatole France

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.--Malcolm S. Forbes

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.--Jim Rohn

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.--Benjamin Franklin

Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot.--Clarence Thomas

The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.--Tyron Edwards

I can but think that the world would be better and brighter if our teachers would dwell on the duty of happiness as well as the happiness of duty; for we ought to be as bright and genial as we can, if only because to be cheerful ourselves is a most effectual contribution to the happiness of others.--John Lubbock, Sir

I consider an human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shows none of its inherent beauties till the skill of the polisher fetches out the colours, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot and vein that runs through the body of it.--Joseph Addison (The Spectator, No. 215, Nov. 5, 1711)

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.--Wilson Mizner

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.--Benjamin Franklin

If all who are engaged in the profession of education were willing to state the facts instead of making greater promises than they can possibly fulfill, they would not be in such bad repute with the lay-public.--Isocrates ("Against the Sophists")

If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.--R. Buckminster Fuller

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.--Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn's Weekly E-zine - August 5, 2003)

If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving that upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.--Daniel Webster

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.--Chinese proverb

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.--Emma Goldman

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself … you rise from the table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.--Oscar Wilde (The Artist as Critic)

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education is a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.--Albert Einstein (in Einstein: His Life and Times by Frank)

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more you must have of the former.--Horace Mann

Knowledge is power and enthusiasm pulls the switch.--Steve Droke

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight train, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.--Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure.--Grayson Kirk

The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education.--Paul E. Gray

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.--Sydney J. Harris

Much 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 W. Gardner 

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.--Cicero

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.--Robert Maynard Hutchins

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary new material, but the warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.--Carl Jung

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.--Bertrand Russell

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn...and change.--Carl Rogers

Our task is to provide an education for the kind of kids we have... Not the kind of kids we used to have... Or want to have... Or the kids that exist in our dreams.--Mary Kay Utecht

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself to do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a person's training begins, it is probably the last lesson a person learn thoroughly.--Thomas Huxle

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.--Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done--men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.--Jean Piaget

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.--Ezra Loomis Pound

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer--into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.--Nancy Astor

The schools of the country are its future in miniature.--Tehyi Hsieh (Chinese Epigrams Inside Out and Proverbs)

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance: that imitation is suicide: that he must take himself for better, or for worse.--Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance)

To accuse others for one's own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.--Epictetus

To learn is to change. Education is a process that changes the learner.--George B. Leonard

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 W. Gardner

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.--John Ciardi

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century--for several centuries. The three or four year' course of lectures, the bachelor who know some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.--H. G. Wells

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.--Margaret Mead

We could revolutionize education if we asked every person connected with the education of children, "Read any good books lately?"--Susan Ohanian 

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.--Joseph Addison

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.--Norman Juster