Quotations on / about education

351

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On", has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.

(Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), U.S. president. Broadside distributed to agents of the New York Life Insurance Company (1932). Former president Coolidge was a director of the New York Life Insurance Company.)
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352

The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differences of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow—despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.

(Isaiah Berlin (b. 1909), British philosopher, essayist. "Winston Churchill," Personal Impressions, Viking Penguin (1980).)
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353

New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education—the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap—and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.

(Alexander Theroux (b. 1940), U.S. novelist, poet, essayist. An Adultery, pt. 1, ch. 12, New York, Simon & Schuster (1987).)
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354

... much less time should be given to school, and much more to domestic employments, especially in the wealthier classes. A little girl may begin, at five or six years of age, to assist her mother: and, if properly trained, by the time she is ten, she can render essential aid. From this time, until she is fourteen or fifteen, it should be the principal object of her education to secure a strong and healthy constitution, and a thorough practical knowledge of all kinds of domestic employments. During this period, though some attention ought to be paid to intellectual culture, it ought to be made altogether secondary in importance.

(Catherine E. Beecher (1800-1878), U.S. educator and author. Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, ch. 4 (1843).)
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355

When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.

(Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher. Philosophy of Mind, part 3: the Encyclopedia, section 1, "Mind Subjective," par. 482, pp. 239-240, Oxford University Press (l971).)
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356

"I wonder what life means," said my friend when he had apparently just been thinking. "I have no idea," I volunteered in my cheerful manner, helpful and yet lighthearted at the same time; for philosophy was to me both an agreeable and an instructive science and presented many worthwhile topics of significance and entertainment to the whole world, and would be a useful ornament rather than a disgrace in any adult conversation that claims to be mature and reflect these enlightened modern times, when so many human beings have received a college education that illiterate democracy is simply packed solid with an unprecedented quantity of well-rounded cultural ingredients, much to the united pride of this abounding twentieth century intellect.

(Marvin Cohen, U.S. author and humorist. The Self-Devoted Friend, New Directions (1967).)
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357

It is an insult to God to believe in God. For on the one hand it is to suppose that he has perpetrated acts of incalculable cruelty. On the other hand, it is to suppose that he has perversely given his human creatures an instrument—their intellect—which must inevitably lead them, if they are dispassionate and honest, to deny his existence. It is tempting to conclude that if he exists, it is the atheists and agnostics that he loves best, among those with any pretensions to education. For they are the ones who have taken him most seriously.

(Galen Strawson (b. 1952), British philosopher, literary critic. Quoted in Independent (London, June 24, 1990).)
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358

Parents teach in the toughest school in the word: The School for Making People. You are the board of education, the principal, the classroom teacher, and the janitor, all rolled into two. . . . There are few schools to train you for your job, and there is no general agreement on the curriculum. . . . You are on duty, or at least on call, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for at least 18 years for each child you have. Besides that, you have to contend with an administration that has two leaders or bosses, whichever the case may be.

(Virginia Satir (20th century), U.S. family therapist and author. The New Peoplemaking, ch. 15 (1988).)
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359

I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.

(Don Delillo (b. 1926), U.S. author. Andreas Eliades, in The Names, ch. 3 (1982).)
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360

We have now become pretty well acquainted with the sugar-growing part of Texas. The life of a planter who has a fair start in the world is one of the most independent imaginable. We here find the pleasures of fashionable life without its tyranny. I doubt, however, whether a person of Northern education could so far forget his home-bred notions and feelings as ever to be thoroughly Southern on the subject of slavery. We have seen none of "the horrors" so often described, but on the other hand I have seen nothing to change my Northern opinions.

(Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893), U.S. president. Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes: Nineteenth President of the United States, vol. I, p. 255, ed. Charles Richard Williams, The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 5 vols. (1922-1926), Hayes to Sophia Birchard Hayes (January 27, 1849). Written to his mother.)
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