Practical Education Quotes

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

I get flack for saying [when I visit a college and give a speech], "This is a nice college, but the really great educator is McDonald's." They hate me for saying this and think I'm a slimy creature. But McDonald's hires people with bad work habits, trains them, and teaches them to come to work on time and have good work habits. I think a lot of what goes on there is better than at Harvard.

Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.

Since we live in an age of innovation, a practical education must prepare a man for work that does not yet exist and cannot yet be clearly defined.

A boy or girl who has gone through the eight grades should possess a complete, practical education and should have received special training in some specific line of work, fitting him or her to earn a livelihood.

The resources of a university, of a college, should not be wasted in merely academic pursuits.

The most successful businessmen were often uneducated when measured by the scholastic standards of the teaching profession. But they were equal to their social function of adjusting production to the most urgent demand. Because of these merits the consumers chose them for business leadership.

Boys should learn that which they will use when men.

Experience is the best of school masters, only the school fees are heavy.

All of our schools need to bring 'learn from doing' into the mainstream education, not just afternoon.

The home was a school. Farm and cabin households, though bookless save for the Family Bible and The Sacred Harp, taught the girls to spin, weave, quilt, cook, sew, and mind their manners; the boys to wield gun, ax, hammer and saw, to ride, plow, sow and reap, and to be men. Nobody need ever be bored. Amusement did not have to be bought.

True education is that which proves useful in life and makes you industrious.

Love requires that true education should be easily accessible to all and should be of use to every villager in this daily life. The emphasis laid on the principle of spending every minute of one's life usefully is the best education for citizenship.

Learning by doing, peer-to-peer teaching, and computer simulation are all part of the same equation.

Students were taught by doing.

A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.

So far I've seen the life studies packet used as (1) an umbrella, (2) a makeshift towel, (3) a pillow, and now this. I have never actually seen anyone study with it, which either means that everyone who graduates from Thomas Jefferson will be totally unprepared for life or that certain things can't be learned in bullet-point format.

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.

I didn't go to high school. I think that after you learn to read and write and do your numbers and flush the toilet behind yourself, you don't need no more schoolin'. You need to get out in the water and swim.

Teach by doing whenever you can, and only fall back upon words when doing it is out of the question.

I was useless in the classroom; I would spend my time looking out of the window after the first 10 minutes. But when you do an apprenticeship, you don't have to wait for the teacher to tell you when it's time to start, because you are on the shop floor learning for real.

I feel strongly that we have to have an education system that starts with preschool and goes through college. That's why I want more technical education in high schools and in community colleges, real apprenticeships to prepare young people for the jobs of the future.

The things you leave school knowing - some dates and long division - so much of it has been of no use to me. Schools should teach the basics of cookery, first aid, how to look after your money and how to speak foreign languages. Useful things.

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated.

We are apt to forget that children watch examples better than they listen to preaching.