Quotes about Education

Thanks to Pixar University, employees learn to see the company's work (and their colleagues) in a new light. "The skills we develop are skills we need everywhere in the organization," Nelson said. "Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn't just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There's no company on earth that wouldn't benefit from having people become more observant."

That helps to explain why the Pixar University crest bears the Latin inscription, Alienus Non Diutius. Translation: alone no longer. "It's the heart of our model," Randy Nelson says, "giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together."

That’s not how most of Hollywood does it—which helps to explain why Pixar does so well. How are you changing the game in your field? What is your distinctive take on how your industry operates? Do you work as distinctively as you compete?

If you want one year of prosperity, plant corn.
If you want ten years of prosperity, plant trees.
If you want one hundred years of prosperity, educate people

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." By W.B. Yeats

I tried to change the author, but I couldn't figure out how. . .

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled.  All our difficulty comes with the others.  When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?  He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem.  We have to recondition him.  But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning.  They're all right already.  They'll believe anything." -Miss Hardcastle

"We want you to write it down--to camouflage it.  Only for the present, of course.  Once the thing gets going we shan't have to bother about the great heart of the British public.  We'll make the great heart what we want it to be.  But in the meantime, it does make a difference how things are put.  For instance, if it were even whispered that the N.IC.E. wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity.  Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to and end.  Odd thing it is--the word 'experiment' is unpopular, but not the word 'experimental.'  You must'nt experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct!"

"Man has got to take charge of Man....

Then real education, including pre-natal education.  By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense.  A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly:  whatever he or his parents try to do about it.  Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain...." -Lord Feverstone

Education is what you have after you have forgotten everything you learned in school.

"We are educating people out of their creative capacities".

I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute."

(his son's Nativity play)...the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance.
If they don't know, they'll have a go.
Am I right?
They're not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Epilogue – Ecological Literacy – excerpt from page 297

Reconnecting with the web of life means building and nurturing sustainable communities in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of further generations. For this task we can learn valuable lessons from the study of ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals and microorganisms. To understand these lessons, we need to learn the basic principles of ecology. We need to become, as it were, ecologically literate. Being ecologically literate, or “ecoliterate,” means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (ecosystems) and using those principles creating sustainable human communities. We need to revitalize our communities – including our educational communities, business communities, and political communities – so that the principles of ecology become manifest in them as principles of education, management, and politics.

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was.

I believe this country stands at a crossroads. For decades, innovation has been the engine of prosperity in this country. Now, economic progress depends more than ever on innovation. And the potential for technology innovation to improve lives has never been greater.... If we make the right choices, the United States can remain the global innovation leader that it is today.

These four policy prescriptions – strengthening educational opportunities, revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, increasing federal funding for basic scientific research, and providing incentives for private-sector R&D – should in my view be top priorities as Congress and the Administration consider how to maintain the nation's leadership in science, technology, and innovation.

Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce.

I think the more you have a generalist perspective, I think sometimes the more you can kind of see through the forest and the trees. And when it gets a little bit cloudy, you know, have some sense of, "Well, maybe this might happen or maybe that might happen." So I really am a big believer in liberal arts education. I think it's better -- particularly in these kind of uncertain times -- to know a little bit about a lot of things as opposed to being expert in one thing.

To explain too much is to steal a person's opportunity to learn, and stealing is against the Law.

Academia was created by business, religion and government as an enclosure for intelligent, altruistic people to keep them occupied and feeling important, and distracted from exposing corruption and working for change.  Fortunately, this strategy hasn't always succeeded.

School is indeed training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

Education of the general population is critical to the transformation of Afghanistan's political and economic condition. On behalf of the novel, the film, Paramount Classics and DreamWorks, I'm delighted they chose to support the work of the Afghan Relief Organization by funding the delivery of laptop computers to the ARO schools in Kabul.

The greatest reward of an education is to be able to face the world with an open mind

I have a lot of energy. I have a great desire to absorb information. I'm not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at -- just walking around Williamsburg, for example -- is a great opportunity for ideas. I've been here before, I've seen things before, but now my eye gets keener and keener. So I can pick up little things: just the pattern of a brick walk, or the way they've attached a light to a house.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom, go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing thst is worth knowing can be taught.

[The ignorance theory]

“A 2001 nationwide poll cited in the NSF’s [National Science Foundation] 2002 report asked the question, ‘Some people possess psychic powers or ESP.  DO you strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree?’  This NSF-sponsored survey found that 60% of adult Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement.  Earlier Gallup polls taken in 1990, 1996, and 2001 showed that these percentages have been increasing over time.  These figures were presented in the context of demonstrating the deplorable state of science education in the United States.

            This would indeed be discouraging, except that the report tiptoes around an interesting fact.  When survey respondents were separated by education level, 46% with less than a high school education agreed that some people possess ESP, but a whopping 62% with high school or more education agreed.  Among the ‘attentive public,’ those defined as ‘very interested’ in a topic, ‘very well informed’ about it, and regularly read a daily newspaper or relevant national magazine, a healthy majority of 59% agreed.  Thus, the survey actually revealed that belief in ESP was not explainable as a matter of poor education.

            To check the NSF’s findings, I examined data collected by the National Opinions Research Center, which is affiliated with the University of Chicago.  This Center, one of the oldest academic survey research groups in the United States, collects in its annual General Social Survey  a wide range of questions used to form a snapshot of opinions in the United States.  One of the questions asked over the years has been about psi.  The specific question I was interested in asks: ‘How often have you felt as though you were in touch with someone when they were far away from you?’  The possible answers ranged from ‘never in my life’ to ‘often.’  I compared those answers to questions on education achievement, which ranged from 0 –20 years of formal education.  The ignorance hypothesis predicts a negative relationship – the more education you have, the less you should believe in psi.  The actual result, based on 3,880 survey responses, was not negative.  In fact, it was significantly positive, with odds against chance of 80 to 1.  This is not just the case in the United States.  The same trend has been observed in Australia, France, and virtually every other country that has reported these surveys.  This finding is even widely acknowledged by skeptics, who gnash their teeth about it.”

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren’s lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency:  emotional literacy.  And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum.  As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that “we care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they’ll be alive next week.”

The end of all education should surely be service to others.

There is no nobler profession, nor no greater calling, than to be among those unheralded many who gave and give their lives to the preservation of human knowledge, passed with commitment and care from one generation to the next.

Human cultures progress through a dance of specialization and integration.  The problem is that the human trait of abstract thinking has allowed our ability to specialize to outpace our ability to integrate knowledge.  Thus, we know more and more details about nothing particularly relevant.  Life becomes a game of trivia played between people who don't have an intrinsic understanding of who, or what, they are and who have little idea how larger social, scientific and cultural systems operate. 

All the "freedom" in the world can not solve this problem, but rather leads to greater confusion.  Lack of freedom throws us into panick and again causes confusion.  We often seek grounding in religion or political movements, but the price of suspending our disbelief is our relinquishment of authority to others no more qualified than the rest of us.  We can not afford, in our globalized, interdependent world, to turn over our otherwise intelligent minds to ideologies and theologies.  We can not afford the divisiveness and arrogance inherent when one believes that theirs is the only way, the "right" way, and that other paths are "evil" or inferior even if they work very well.

If we declare our race to be HUMAN, our religion to be KINDNESS and our nature to be A WONDERFUL SPECIES OF PRIMATES, we will gradually learn to exercise rational control over our minds, our culture and our planet.

What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent - in the broadest and best sense, intelligent - is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety of interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.

Learning your MISSION,supplying your VISION, KNOWLEGDE builds there.