Education and Knowledge

I am opposed to examinations—they only deter from the interest in studying. No more than two exams should be given throughout a student’s [college] career. I would hold seminars, and if the young people are interested and listen, I would give them a diploma.

The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship material success as a preparation for his future career.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Regarding sex education: no secrets!

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Don’t worry about your marks. Just make sure that you keep up with the work and that you don’t have to repeat a year. It is not necessary to have good marks in everything.

You should try to remember that a dedicated teacher is a valuable messenger from the past, and can be an escort to your future.

Most teachers waste their time by asking questions that are intended to discover what a pupil does not know, whereas the true art of questioning is to discover what the pupil does know or is capable of knowing.

The wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations, produced by enthusiastic effort and infinite labour in every country of the world. All this is put into your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children. Thus do we mortals achieve immortality in the permanent things which we create in common.

Preceding generations have presented us, in a highly developed science and mechanical knowledge, with a most valuable gift which carries with it possibilities of making our life free and beautiful such as no previous generation has enjoyed. But this gift also brings with it dangers to our existence as great as any that have ever threatened it.

I am only coming to Princeton to research, not to teach. There is too much education altogether, especially in American schools. The only rational way of educating is to be an example – of what to avoid, if one can’t be the other sort.

Contact between the intellectual and the masses must not be lost. It is necessary for the elevation of society and no less so for renewing the strength of the intellectual worker; for the flower of science does not grow in the desert.

It is just as important to make knowledge live and to keep it alive as to solve specific problems.

One impulse from a vernal wood

In common things that round us lie

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

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

Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.