Lapham’s Quarterly

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

Repetition is the mother of education.

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.