Education is a good thing. However, modern Western education is usually anything but real education. It tends to be much more about indoctrination, propaganda and proselyting. Many have spoken about the role and value of education, and how it should and should not be carried out.
The bulk of the quotes I offer here reflect of course my take on things – that is, they represent a conservative and Christian point of view for the most part. And here I simply offer them in alphabetical order of the author, and sadly without their references.
Aristotle “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
Mortimer Adler “Whoever passes by what is over his head condemns his head to its present low altitude; for nothing can elevate a mind except what is over its head; and that elevation is not accomplished by capillary attraction, but only by the hard work of climbing up the ropes, with sore hands and aching muscles.”
“Finally, there is the even deeper vicious circle in which an educational system and the society in which it flourishes are reciprocal. You cannot improve a society without changing its education; but you cannot lift the educational system above the level of the society in which it exists.”
Allan Bloom “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. . . . The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error, but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.”
“Every education system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain type of human being.”
J. Budziszewski “Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit.”
G. K. Chesterton “The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.”
“Public education has not produced an educated public.”
“Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.”
“[Our primary public duty] is not to educate the uneducated but to uneducate the educated.”
Winston Churchill “Schools have not necessarily much to do with education… they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.”
Anne Coulter “Public schools are forbidden from mentioning religion not because of the Constitution, but because public schools are the Left’s madrassas. . . . At least the crazy Muslims get funding from Saudi Arabia for their madrassas. Liberals force normal Americans to pay for their religious schools.”
“It’s well past time for Liberalism to be declared a religion and banned from public schools. No other religion has the right to propagandize children for 12 years, six hours a day.”
A. A. Hodge “The prevalent superstition that men can be educated for good citizenship or for any other use under heaven without religion is as unscientific and unphilosophical as it is irreligious. It deliberately leaves out of view the most essential and controlling elements of human character….
C. S. Lewis “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
“I do not draw from this moral that it is now our business to ‘get our teeth into the schools’. For one thing, I do not think we shall be allowed to. It is unlikely that in the next forty years England will have a government which would encourage or even tolerate any radically Christian elements in its State system of education. Where the tide flows towards increasing State control, Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact (although not for a long time yet in words) be treated as an enemy. Like learning, like the family, like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing ground against the State.”
J. GreshamMachen “The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, important as those institutions are; but it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. I suppose my experience is the same as that of a good many of us. I did not get my knowledge of the Bible from Sunday School or from any other school, but I got it on Sunday afternoons with my mother at home.”
Malcolm Muggeridge “Whereas other civilisations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense.”
“Education, the great mumbo-jumbo and fraud of the age, purports to equip us to live, and is prescribed as a universal remedy for everything, from juvenile delinquency to premature senility. For the most part, it serves only to enlarge stupidity, inflate conceit, enhance credulity and put those subjected to it, at the mercy of brain-washers with printing presses, radio and television at their disposal. I have seen pictures of huge, ungainly, prehistoric monsters who developed such a weight of protective shell that they sank under its burden and became extinct. Our civilisation likewise is sinking under the burden of its own wealth, and the necessity to consume it; of its own happiness, and the necessity to provide and sustain the fantasies which embody it; of its own security and the ever more fabulously destructive nuclear devices considered essential to it. Thus burdened, it, too, might well soon become extinct. As this fact sinks into the collective consciousness, the resort to drugs, dreams, fantasies and other escapist devices, particularly sex, becomes ever more marked.”
Theodore Roosevelt “To educate a child in the mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
Roger Scruton “Tenured professors enjoy all the privileges of the academy in return for relentless debunking of the civilization that made this possible.”
Bishop Fulton Sheen “There is no such thing as neutral education; that is, education without morality and religion. Religion and morality are not related to education like raisins to a cake, but as a soul to a body. There can be cake without raisins, but there cannot be man without a soul. If education does not inculcate a moral outlook, it will inculcate a materialist or a Communist or a Nazi outlook. Neutrality is absolutely impossible in education. By the mere fact that religious and moral training is neglected, a non-religious, non-morality and by consequence an anti-religious and anti-moral ideology will be developed. ‘He that is not with me is against me.’ (Matt. 12:30).”
Inside American Educationby Sowell, Thomas (Author)
Thomas Sowell “Our whole educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities, is increasingly turning out people who have never heard enough conflicting arguments to develop the skills and discipline required to produce a coherent analysis, based on logic and evidence.”
“The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.”
“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans– anything except reason.”
“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried,’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.”
“That educators who have repeatedly failed to do what they are hired to do, and trained to do, should take on sweeping roles as amateur psychologists, sociologists, and social philosophers seems almost inexplicable—except that they are doing it with other people’s money and experimenting on other people’s children.”
“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”
“In short, too many American schools are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated, and socially maladjusted.”
“Academics are a special-interest group. Their special interest is to get their production costs paid for by other people [notably the taxpayers] and to give their product a good image so that it will sell. Whether their product actually helps the consumer afterwards is secondary, at best.”
“Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our political parties can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.”
Mark Steyn “Education is the biggest single structural defect in the United States.”
“The massive expansion of American education is evidence not of progress but of its exact opposite – its decay into ideological factory farms. It’s a progressive 4-H: Hogwash, Hypersensitivity, Habituation, Homogeneity – for the price of which you wind up in Hock.”
“For four decades America watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while conservatives deluded themselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact, that it could be contained within the precincts of academe, was always foolish.”
Mark Twain “I was born intelligent, education ruined me.”
George Will “All education is moral because learning conditions conduct.”
Walter Williams “For somebody to do well in school, somebody needs to make him to go to bed on time and get a good 10 hours of sleep. Someone must make him do his homework. Somebody must feed him breakfast in the morning and somebody must make him mind the teacher. If those things are not done, I don’t care how much money you put in the school system, education will not occur.”
In many … countries, … scientific, technological, organizational, and entrepreneurial skills tend to be neglected in favor of education in easier subjects.
the Malay college students have tended to concentrate in the liberal arts and many have ended up working for the government after graduation, for they lacked skills that would have a value in the economy. Nor is Malaysia unique in this respect. A Cabinet member in Fiji declared frankly that the “only use” for the Fijian students coming out of their educational system was “in government service, to warm public chairs.” In India, three-quarters of the college graduates have gone to work for the government, and a leading authority on Africa described African education as “a machine for producing graduate bureaucrats.”
Indonesian youth have likewise turned after graduation toward bureaucratic careers, despite the warning of Indonesian novelist Ananta Toer that “we must get rid of the silly idea of wanting to be government clerks.” Government employment remains a prime objective and a prime source of intergroup conflict in underdeveloped countries around the world.
Formal education, especially among peoples for whom it is rare or recent, often creates feelings of entitlement to rewards and exemption from many kinds of work. In India, for example, even the rudiments of an education have often been enough to create a reluctance to take any job involving work with one’s hands.
Nor is this social phenomenon limited to India. Other Third World nations have shown similar patterns.
Such attitudes affect both the employed and the unemployed. Even those educated as engineers have often preferred desk jobs and tended to “recoil from the prospect of physical contact with machines.”
In short, education can reduce an individual’s productivity by the expectations and aversions it creates, as well as increase it by the skills and disciplines it may (or may not) engender. The specific kind of education, the nature of the individual who receives it, and the cultural values of the society itself all determine whether, or to what extent, there are net benefits from more schooling. Blindly processing more people through schools may not promote economic development, and may well increase political instability.
A society can be made ungovernable by the impossibility of satisfying those with a passionate sense of entitlement–and without the skills or diligence to create the national wealth from which to redeem these expectations. The role of soft-subject intellectuals–notably professors and schoolteachers–in fomenting internal strife and separatism, from the Basques in Spain to the French in Canada, adds another set of dangers of political instability from schooling without skills.
Hi Bill Muhlenberg
You and Douglas Groothuis obviously have a lot in common, not “only” as book collectors but that you have “a library”
https://www.douglasgroothuis.com/post/for-the-love-of-books
Thanks Rolf.
Race and Culture by Thomas Sowell
what kind of education
In many … countries, … scientific, technological, organizational, and entrepreneurial skills tend to be neglected in favor of education in easier subjects.
the Malay college students have tended to concentrate in the liberal arts and many have ended up working for the government after graduation, for they lacked skills that would have a value in the economy. Nor is Malaysia unique in this respect. A Cabinet member in Fiji declared frankly that the “only use” for the Fijian students coming out of their educational system was “in government service, to warm public chairs.” In India, three-quarters of the college graduates have gone to work for the government, and a leading authority on Africa described African education as “a machine for producing graduate bureaucrats.”
Indonesian youth have likewise turned after graduation toward bureaucratic careers, despite the warning of Indonesian novelist Ananta Toer that “we must get rid of the silly idea of wanting to be government clerks.” Government employment remains a prime objective and a prime source of intergroup conflict in underdeveloped countries around the world.
Formal education, especially among peoples for whom it is rare or recent, often creates feelings of entitlement to rewards and exemption from many kinds of work. In India, for example, even the rudiments of an education have often been enough to create a reluctance to take any job involving work with one’s hands.
Nor is this social phenomenon limited to India. Other Third World nations have shown similar patterns.
Such attitudes affect both the employed and the unemployed. Even those educated as engineers have often preferred desk jobs and tended to “recoil from the prospect of physical contact with machines.”
In short, education can reduce an individual’s productivity by the expectations and aversions it creates, as well as increase it by the skills and disciplines it may (or may not) engender. The specific kind of education, the nature of the individual who receives it, and the cultural values of the society itself all determine whether, or to what extent, there are net benefits from more schooling. Blindly processing more people through schools may not promote economic development, and may well increase political instability.
A society can be made ungovernable by the impossibility of satisfying those with a passionate sense of entitlement–and without the skills or diligence to create the national wealth from which to redeem these expectations. The role of soft-subject intellectuals–notably professors and schoolteachers–in fomenting internal strife and separatism, from the Basques in Spain to the French in Canada, adds another set of dangers of political instability from schooling without skills.