Frederic Raphael Quotes

One of the things that really drove me crazy was the way in which college kids, in particular, are educated to think that ideology is dangerous and bad.

A university is a place that is established and will function for the benefit of society provided it is a center of independent thought.

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

Most American elementary schools and high schools, and nearly all colleges and universities, teach everything that is significant from a liberal/Left perspective.

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

Personally, I think universities are finished. So much rubbish gets taught.

We have therefore decided that in the most pleasant city of Naples there should be teaching of the arts and of all disciplines, so that those who are starved for knowledge will find it in our own kingdom, and will not be forced, in their search for knowledge, to become pilgrims and to beg in foreign lands

Universities are the temple through which alone lies the road to that of Liberty.

I am an academic, and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.

It's one of the tragedies of the modern university that it offers little space to generalists.

College works on the factory model and is, in many ways, not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student, and out comes a scholar.

As a kid you learn that there are thinkers and there are philosophers and there are theologian, and I'd hear little bits of the ideas that these people pursued or developed or created and I'd be really excited. Then I'll start to read it and I think, "Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn't a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself."

I was very intellectually oriented, very early on.

Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don't seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn't have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.

A wise system of education will at last teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

I almost got a psychology degree, I almost got a philosophy degree. I kept changing it so they couldn't make me graduate. I studied anthropology and eastern religion, epistomology, and astronomy... I took every interesting course I could find for nine years.

A society that thinks the choice between ways of living is just a choice between equally eligible 'lifestyles' turns universities into academic cafeterias offering junk food for the mind.

I love doing research. It's like cheating, but with permission.

Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.

Colleges and classrooms should be havens of tranquility, places where thoughtful discussions occur, where students work together with their teachers to acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences.