Edward Lear Quotes

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

Self-education is a continuing source of pleasure to me, for the more I know, the fuller my life is and the better I appreciate my own existence

Not all schooling is education nor all education, schooling.

I like learning new stuff, and continuing to educate myself as best I can.

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

I didn't go to high school, and I didn't go to grade school either. Education, I think, is for refinement and is probably a liability.

Take advantage of educating yourself.

I've never been a big believer in formal education.

Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well-educated.

Whatever education I got was from experience and reading. But I also realize I wouldn't pass my friend's sixth-grade class.

I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.

I hate the the word 'disempower,' because it seems kind of cliche, but I do think that we take people's ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way.

What is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should have the opportunity of teaching itself. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.

A man must always study, but he must not always go to school: what a contemptible thing is an old abecedarian!

All that a university or final highest school. can do for us is still but what the first school began doing--teach us to read. We learn to read in various languages, in various sciences; we learn the alphabet and letters of all manner of books. But the place where we are to get knowledge, even theoretic knowledge, is the books themselves. It depends on what we read, after all manner of professors have done their best for us. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.

I suppose that in no educational institution can one become an educated person.

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.

I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.

It is clearly absurd to limit the term 'education' to a person's formal schooling.

Going to university is only one avenue to gain knowledge. There are others. A degree isn't insurance against ignorance.