Purpose of Education

I saw a post today about the purpose of education, which led me on a rabbit trail. Here are some of my favorite quotes that I found...

"It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated." - Alec Bourne, A Doctor's Creed

"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." - Cicero

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." - Anatole France

"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think." - Socrates

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts." - C. S. Lewis

"Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it." - Sir William Haley

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think." - Anne Sullivan

"Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune." - Jim Rohn

"Education costs money, but then so does ignorance." - Sir Claus Moser

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

"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life." - Source Unknown

"Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." - Henry Peter Broughan

"Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." - G. M. Trevelyan

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." - Henry Brooks Adams

"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child." - George Bernard Shaw

"We have come to realise that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school" - Ivan Illich

"All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education." - Sir Walter Scott

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - William Butler Yeats

"He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn't know." - George Simmel, German Philosopher

"I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me." - St. Augustine

"I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." - Albert Einstein

"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas." - Agatha Christie

"The idea is to educate, not follow anyone's schedule about when something should be studied." - Ray Drouillard

"The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives." - Robert Maynard Hutchins

"Parents give up their rights when they drop the children off at public school." - Melinda Harmon, Federal Judge, 1996