What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know; it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Yogi Berra
The problem is not that public schools do not work well, but rather that they do. The first goal and primary function of schools is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we normally label state indoctrination.
— Wendy McElroy, Demystifying the State
There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
— John Locke, 1693
What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook
— Henry David Thoreau
It is time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy. It’s a bureaucratic system where everybody’s role is spelled out in advance, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s not a surprise when a school system doesn’t improve. It more resembles a Communist economy than our own market economy.
— Albert Shanker
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
— Ezra Loomis Pound
Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
— Winston Churchill
There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.
— Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
— Malcolm S. Forbes
It would be a mistake to assume that the present-day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.
— Alvin Toffler
The highest result of education is tolerance.
— Helen Keller
My grandmother wanted me to have an education so she kept me out of school.
— Margaret Mead