Educational Shortcomings Quotes

What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been wrong innumerable times, by vast amounts, and with catastrophic results. Yet today there are still people who think that anyone who disagrees with them must be either bad or not know what he is talking about…Students can graduate from even the most prestigious colleges and universities wholly unaware that there are not simply different opinions about particular issues but a whole comprehensive framework of ideas and analysis through which those issues can be seen in a way that leads to very different conclusions from the ones their professors have taught or insinuated…It is a shame that ancient history is seldom taught in our schools. Finding out that people thousands of years ago were basically pretty much the way they are today — people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual orientation—would reduce our chances of having Utopian hopes for big changes any time soon.

Nothing has so exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves. Those who have been taught to consider the institutions of the schools as giving the last perfection to human abilities are surprised to see men wrinkled with study, yet wanting to be instructed in the minute circumstances of propriety, or the necessary form of daily transaction; and quickly shake off their reverence for modes of education which they find to produce no ability above the rest of mankind.

Do I think I'm under-educated? Academically, absolutely. I never took any exams, no O- or A-levels.

I regret the trifling narrow contracted education of the females of my own country.

Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience.

A casual attitude toward human hurt and pain is the surest sign of educational failure.

This nation has been drifting back in comparison with the rest of the world for the last 20 years in education.

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.

I tell you, in this country, you don't get much of an education. Throughout high school, through junior college, which is all I went, I didn't know anything about the annihilation of all the Indian nations that were here.

I didn't write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.

Common sense, alas in spite of our educational institutions, is a rare commodity.

Education today does not impart to the students the capacity or grit to face the challenges of daily life. The educational field has become the playing ground of ignorance.

A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student.

Most teachers still say they love teaching though they wouldn't mind a little more respect for their challenging work and a little less blame for America's educational shortcomings.

My students may have dexterity with the equations they're required to know, but they lack the capacity to apply their knowledge to real-life problems. This critical shortcoming appears in high school and possibly in elementary grades - long before college.

Democracy has betrayed the race, because education has not served man as was expected.

Countries like Japan do not have to change their cultures to address their educational shortcomings; they simply have to adjust their policies and practices.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

I also think that there is a huge failure in the American education system to educate Americans about where we, our system, our government, came from. And to some extent this failure is shared in places like Britain and Canada and Australia.

Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history.

We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.