What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught as that every child should be given the wish to learn. If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called Research. The (perhaps apocryphal) tale is told about Charles Darwin that, on one of his expeditions, some of the members carefully put together parts of several different insects and, as a joke, presented the “new species” to Darwin, asking him to identify it. “That,” said Darwin, “is a humbug. Ignorance is the only slavery. On the statistical level, formal education and lifetime achievement appear closely related. On the individual level, however, there are many exceptions. For example:
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” —Mark Twain “For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” —H.L. Menken “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.” “All the world's a stage, and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.” —Sean O'Casey
“Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.” — Diogenes “Education ... means emancipation. It means light
and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious
light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.” All knowledge is lost that ends in the mere knowing;
for every truth is a light given us A useful recent book on educational vouchers is: Terry M. Moe's "Schools, Vouchers,
and the American Public," Moe has also written, with John Chubb, "Politics, Markets and America's Schools. A third worthwhile book is Richard D. Kahlenberg's "All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public Schools." A good review of this subject was published
by Kahlenberg in The Nation, 26 Nov 2001, pp.30-32. “A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.”— Ezra Pound, author “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution.” — Theodosius Dobzhansky “The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenonmena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: Our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.” — William Whewell “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” — James Madison “You can always spot a well-informed man. His
views are usually the same as your own.” “Education: That which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of understanding.“ — Ambrose Bierce “There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.“ — Benjamin Disraeli “Today,
parents of school-age children are increasingly aware that the public
school system considers their children little more than wards of the state,
committed five days a week, nine and one-half months a year, to an institution
whose primary consideration is now security, with education little more
than an abstract ideal whose advertising value keeps the money flowing
in. Many schools are little more than armed camps, at times approaching
the characteristics of a part-time minimum-security prison.“ “Education without caring, without a soul, without spirit, without purpose beyond subject matter is as viable as a person with a brain but without a heart.“ — anon “... reform the environment and not man; being absolutely confident that if you give man the right environment, he will behave favorably.” — R. Buckminster Fuller “Almost
every child who watches TV will go down in history, and also in English
and arithmetic.” — anon
Asked
what he would do first if called upon to rule a country, Confucious said: [Back] |