"To be successful as a human being and an American citizen, is the
goal that the public schools of the country have set for their pupils..."
-- John Dewey, The Schools of Tomorrow, p. 177
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within
himself."
-- Galileo
"It's a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school."
-- Ferris Bueller, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
"There are two kinds of people in this world: Those that enter a room
and turn the television set on, and those that enter a room and turn the
television set off."
-- Raymond Shaw, in The
Manchurian Candidate (1962).
U.N. Repressentative: So, Mr. Evil --
Dr. Evil: It's 'Doctor' Evil, I didn't spend six years in Evil
Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much.
-- An exchange from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.
"How can we hope to remain economically competitive in a world in which...90%
of Dutch high-school students take advanced math courses and 100% of teachers
in Germany have double majors, while the best we can say about our "pocket
of excellence" is that 75% of [American] students have learned to "critique
tactfully?"
-- Barbara J. Alexander
"Academy: A modern school where football is taught."
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the
foolish their lack of understanding.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy
to govern but impossible to enslave."
-- Baron Henry Peter Brougham -- perhaps why the powers-that-be seem not
all that interested in truly educating the people.
"If you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university
has failed you."
-- Robert F. Goheen
"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
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
-- H.G. Wells
"There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those
who hate them."
-- Emile Chartier
"This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn
things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens
such as educating people and doing research."
-- Neal Stephenson, in a description of Randy Waterhouse, a character
in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.