Perfect Quotes

One of my favorite things to do (when I am not working, teaching, cooking, gardening, shoveling, feeding farm animals, doing laundry, making beds, washing dishes, and cleaning) is to collect quotes. Since I was young I have always been fascinated by these tiny phrases, probably because they were almost always found in a historical context and written by “ancient” famous people. Reading through quotes on any subject always made me think that despite the ravages of time and the checkered history of the human race, there were certain truths that remain as valid today as they were when they were first spoken hundreds and thousands of years ago. In other words, we haven’t changed much despite the advancements and technological progress that we have made, and wisdom can still be found in dusty old volumes of ‘Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations’.
An exceptionally good English teacher in high school years ago once told our class that ‘Times may change but people never will’. Of course, the things that this man taught ignored the curriculum entirely 9/10ths of the time, but they resulted in a deeper understanding of what was important in life, and I will always be grateful to him for that. The ‘Times’ quote was one of his most important pearls of wisdom.
I compiled a few nice quotes on education that I have collected over the years, and I am listing them below for fun. The most wonderful thing about these expressions is that they get to the heart of what education really means and it’s original purpose in expanding and fulfilling human potential. The most important skills we learn are those that have nothing to do with study habits, decoding, grammatical sentence structure, and arithmetic. We have been raised to believe that the key to success is the intimate knowledge of unrelated factual tidbits, but it remains true that a person could be highly educated without knowing any of these things, so the current definition of education needs to be revised.
What education really is and what the bureaucracies and governments want it to be are two different things. At this time we need to quit assuming that workbooks, tests, and repetitive drills can in any way replace the mental and spiritual nourishment of a young child, and create wisdom where none existed and conditions never fostered it to begin with. We are facing a future where wisdom, so heavily valued in the past, will be vitally necessary again in order to circumvent challenges that lie ahead. It has never been so important to raise kids with good heads on their shoulders, in other words. The time to get started is now.
- I am not young enough to know everything—J.M.Barrie
-I have never let my schooling interfere with my education—Mark Twain
-I am always ready to learn, but I do not always like being taught—Sir Winston Churchill
-A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure.—Bernard Iddings Bell Chaplain
-Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten—B.F. Skinner
-Valuable achievement can sprout from human society only when it is sufficiently loosened to make possible the free development of an individual’s abilities—Albert Einstein
-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
-You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.—Galileo Galilei

Goodbye and Good Luck,
Anonymom:)