True education is to learn how to think, not what to think. If you know how to think, if you really have that capacity, then you are a free human being—free of dogmas, superstitions, ceremonies—and therefore you can find out what religion is.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
—Oscar Wilde
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
—B. F. Skinner
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
—Gore Vidal
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods. We cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a cat, of a spider. Far better was the Roman rule to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bachelor's degrees make pretty good placemats if you get 'em laminated.
—Jeph Jacques
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
—Malcolm Forbes
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
—Evan Esar
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
—Alec Bourne
You must adjust.… This is the legend imprinted in every schoolbook, the invisible message on every blackboard. Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots.
—Robert Lindner
Education directs all our attention towards knowledge and attaches no importance to understanding. Exposing children to this kind of influence means that they reach adult life having lost themselves, being entirely dependent upon external things—possessions, the opinions of other people, appearances, and so on.
—John G. Bennett
All intellectuals complain about their school days. This is ridiculous.
—Lord Clark
I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result, I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
—George Steiner
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
—Alvin Toffler
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
—Randall Jarrell