Andrew Nikiforuk Quotes

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.

We are taught words, not ideas.

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.

If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief. The opinion prevailed amoung advanced minds that it was time that belief should be replaced increasingly by knowledge; belief that did not itself rest on knowledge was superstition, and as such had to be opposed. According to this conception, the sole function of education was to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser among dusty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.

The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.

I always say that, to me, it starts with reading. This is something I tell high school kids, college kids, people trying to get into the business, that it's just so much about reading. Read, read, read. So much of everything else falls into place when you just do a ton of reading.

School's a weird thing. I'm not sure it works.

Perception of ideas, rather than the storing of them, should be the aim of education.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.

Everyone goes to rotten schools when they're kids, don't they?

My alma mater was books, a good library.

When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back.