Education Philosophy Quotes

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

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear.

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.

What the best and wisest parent wants for his child must be what the community wants for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; it destroys our democracy.

Learning isn't a means to an end; it is an end in itself.

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

I grant this mode of secluding boys from the intercourse of private families has a tendency to make them scholars, but our business is to make them men, citizens, and Christians. The vices of young people are generally learned from each other. The vices of adults seldom infect them. By separating them from each other, therefore, in their hours of relaxation from study, we secure their morals from a principal source of corruption, while we improve their manners by subjecting them to those restraints which the difference of age and sex naturally produce in private families.

Education is a daily growth. It's not about the degrees but about the kind of person it makes one. I feel it makes a human being complete.

The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle. The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth.

We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity, which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Laical education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up those treasures, and those of Christianity as well.

For me, teaching is about weaving a web of connectedness between myself, my students, the subject I'm teaching, and the larger world.

If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.

The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.

Schools teach the need to be taught.

First the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect.

Reading might not be the way that the child engages with the world, but it should be something that they all learn how to do, and that they get to have for themselves, as opposed to somebody telling them what to do and how to do it.

Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

The natural tendency of children is to solve problems, but we try to indoctrinate them with facts, which they are supposed to feed back, and then we fail them. And that's child abuse. And you should never raise children that way. You should cultivate and encourage their natural tendencies to create solutions to the problems around them.

You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.

Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.

Education is neither eastern nor western.

Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.