The Best Education, Teaching & Homeschool Quotations —
Quotes to Inspire You, to Motivate You, and to Encourage You!

 
“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”  ~Aristotle

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”  ~Henry Brooks Adams

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”   ~Thomas Carlyle

“The home is the chief school of human virtues.”  ~William Ellery Channing

“The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.”   ~John W. Gardner

“The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.” ~Bishop Mandell Creighton

"There are two types of education… One should teach us how to make a living…and the other, how to live."  ~John Adams

“The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things—the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.”  ~Ben Jonson

“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child.”  ~Plato

“The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion—these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.”  ~Jerome S. Bruner

“Any place that anyone young can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution.”  ~Al Capp

"Homeschooling and public schooling are as opposite as two sides of a coin. In a homeschooling environment, the teacher need not be certified, but the child MUST learn. In a public school environment, the teacher MUST be certified, but the child need NOT learn."  ~Gene Royer

“Home is not where you live but where they understand you.”  ~Christian Morgenstern

“Learning is finding out what you already know, Doing is demonstrating that you know it, Teaching is reminding others that they know it as well as you do. We are all learners, doers, and teachers.”  ~Richard David Bach

“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”  ~Clay P. Bedford 

“A sense of curiosity is nature's original school of education.”  ~Smiley Blanton

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”  ~Derek Curtis Bok

“Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher.”  ~Buddha

“Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”  ~John Cotton Dana

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”  ~Will Durant

“The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.”  ~Tyron Edwards

“To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully.”  ~Tyron Edwards

“If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.”  ~Tyron Edwards

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”  ~Albert Einstein

“You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.” 
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.” 
~Ignacio Estrada

“The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.” 
~Paul Karl Feyerabend

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”  ~Robert Frost

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.” 
~Galileo Galilei

“I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.”  ~John W. Gardner

“The most important outcome of education is to help students become independent of formal education.”  ~Paul E. Gray

“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

“Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.”  ~Napoleon Hill

“One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” 
~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

“To teach is to learn twice.”  ~Joseph Jubert

“Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.”  ~John F. Kennedy

“Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.”  ~Florence King

“The education of a man is never completed until he dies.”  ~Robert E. Lee

“Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it.”
~Madeline L’ Engle

“I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.” 
~Dudley Field Malone

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” ~H.L. Mencken

“I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life.”  ~Petronius

”The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.”  ~Jean Piaget

“It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.”  ~Bertrand Russell

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”  ~George Santayana

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

“Men learn while they teach.”  ~Seneca

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”  ~Joseph Stalin

“Our task is to provide an education for the kind of kids we have… Not the kind of kids we used to have… Or want to have… Or the kids that exist in our dreams.”  ~Mary Kay Utech

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”  ~Oscar Wilde

“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

"To confuse compulsory schooling with equal educational opportunity is like confusing organized religion with spirituality. One does not necessarily lead to the other. Schooling confuses teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. "  ~Wendy Priesnitz