Lapham’s Quarterly

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

Repetition is the mother of education.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.