Food For Your Thoughts: Famous Quotes on Education
What do you think are the views of our great social icons regarding the importance of education? Well, read on and learn a bit or two straight from their brilliant minds. Who knows, maybe if you take their advice serious enough, you might just be the next heir to their fame.
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
~ Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela is the first black President of South Africa to be elected in fully representative democratic elections. Mandela has received many South African, foreign and international honors, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, the Order of Merit and the Order of St. John from Queen Elizabeth II and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush.
“By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name.”
~ Plato
Plato was a Classical Greek philosopher. Together with his teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the philosophical foundations of Western culture. Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world.
“Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy aka JFK was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. The charismatic President’s wife is fashion icon Jacqueline Lee Bouvier who has later become known as Jackie O. The couple is icons of the modern US civilization.
“We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet, and leader of the Transcendentalist movement in the early nineteenth century. He is the son of the Rev. William Emerson, who is also a Unitarian minister in a famous line of ministers. He gave the speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which is considered to be America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”
“Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.”
~ John Adams
John Adams, Jr. was the second President of the United States (1797–1801) and he was the first President to reside in the newly built White House in Washington, D.C., when it was completed in 1800. Adams also served as America’s first Vice President (1789–1797). John Adams is famed as a sponsor of the American Revolution in Massachusetts, was a driving force for independence in 1776; Thomas Jefferson called him the “Colossus of Independence”.
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically… Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.
“Knowledge without education is but armed injustice.”
~ Horace
Horace is generally considered by classicists to be one of the greatest Latin poets. He was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus.
“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself.”
~ John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thoughts and ideas have been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. He, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism. He is also known as the father of functional psychology and he was a leading representative of the progressive movement in U.S. schooling during the first half of the 20th century.
“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
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He was one of the first to systematize philosophy and science. It is the opinion of many that Aristotle’s system of thought remains the most influential one ever put together by any single mind. According to historian Will Durant, no other philosopher has contributed so much to the enlightenment of the world. He single-handedly founded the sciences of Logic, Biology and Psychology. Aristotle is referred to as “The Philosopher” by Scholastic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas.
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
~ Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” In 1999 Einstein was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Century”, and a poll of prominent physicists named him the greatest physicist of all time.
