Quotes by Historians - Page 91

A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument
Andrew Pettegree
Everything interested him and everything excited him.
Barbara W. Tuchman
If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.
Noam Chomsky
A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: "Live for that better day.
Barbara W. Tuchman
If it's really education you want for Nathan,' Buell said, 'have him read the papers, so he'll know what's going on in the world, and why. Teach him to be interested in everything he doesn't understand - interested enough to find out about it from books or people that aren't afraid to tell the truth.
Kenneth Roberts
Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.
Diane Ravitch
If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.
Noam Chomsky
But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. "All that has been changed," cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical, and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune, the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of willful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness, and self-protective illusion.
H.G.Wells
Education, from Addams' perspective, must not merely make us more adept at defending ourselves against those with different agendas. Education should increase our powers of empathy and our ability to act in concert with others.
Michael S. Roth
Beware of critics of education who cloak their desire to protect privilege (and inequality) in the garb of educational reform.
Michael S. Roth
Defining by a general law the expenditures on the...school....is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.
Karl Marx
A deep commitment to general education is impossible in a context in which faculty and students prize above all their ability to teach and study what they want.
Michael S. Roth
I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture.
H.G.Wells
Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.
Mark C. Carnes
Civilization is not inherited it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…
Will Durant
Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.
Karen Armstrong
Most schooling is training for stupidity and conformity, and that's institutional, but occasionally you get a spark, somebody'll challenge your mind, make you think and so on, and that has a tremendous effect you just reach all sorts of people. Of course if you do it you may very have problems, you have to tread the narrow line. There are plenty of people who don't want students to think, they're afraid of the crisis of democracy. If people start thinking you get all these problems that I quoted before. They won't have enough humility to submit to a civil rule or they'll start trying to press their demands in the political arena and have ideas of their own, instead of beleiving what they're told. And privelage and power typically doesn't want that and so they react and the high school teacher that tries to get students to think may find oppression, firing and so on.
Noam Chomsky
All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them.from a speech by the Nazi Minister of Education
William L. Shirer
Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.
Edward Gibbon
I wonder if more students would do better in elementary and high school if teachers taught more about individual exploration of subjects and less about sliding smoothly along observational ruts. Exploration is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.
John R. Stilgoe
The cure to eliminate fake news is that people stop reading 140-character tweets and start reading 600-page books.
Piero Scaruffi
To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.
Thomas Frank
The other day I happened to be reading a careful, interesting account of the state of British higher education. The government is a kind of market-oriented government and they came out with an official paper, a ‘White Paper’ saying that it is not the responsibility of the state to support any institution that can’t survive in the market. So, if Oxford is teaching philosophy, the arts, Greek history, medieval history, and so on, and they can’t sell it on the market, why should they be supported? Because life consists only of what you can sell in the market and get back, nothing else. That is a real pathology.
Noam Chomsky
Successful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history.
Eric Foner
Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.
Jean Leclercq
In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, they read usually, not as today, principally with the eyes, but with the lips, pronouncing what they saw, and with the ears, listening to the words pronounced. hearing what is called the "voices of the pages." It is a real acoustical reading.
Jean Leclercq
In spite of this, there is no doubt that the modern European and American system of universal education suffered from serious defects. In the first place, the achievement of universality was purchased by the substitution of quantitative for qualitative standards. Education was accepted as a good in itself and the main question was how to increase the total output: how to teach more and more people more and more subjects for longer and longer periods. But in proportion as education became universal, it became cheapened. Instead of being regarded as the privilege of a few it became a compulsory routine for everybody.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he left the private school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but intemperate habits,—that is to say, it was in a thorough mess.
H.G.Wells
...the more widely we extend the range of education, the more necessary it is to provide some principle of cohesion to counterbalance the centrifugal tendencies of specialization and utilitarianism.
Christopher Henry Dawson
...the establishment of a universal system of public education inevitably changed the relations of education to the state.It is this above all else which has caused the mind of our society to lose its independence, so that there is no power left outside politics to guide modern civilization, when the politicians go astray. For in proportion as education becomes controlled by the state, it becomes nationalized, and in extreme cases the servant of a political party.
Christopher Henry Dawson
For the immense extension of the scale of education and its ramification into a hundred specialisms and technical disciplines has left the state as the only unifying element in the whole system. In the past the traditional system of classical education provided a commo intellectual background and a common scale of values which transcended national and political frontiers and formed the European or Western republic of letters of which every scholar was a citizen.
Christopher Henry Dawson
...education has always meant the initiation of the young into the social and spiritual inheritance of the community: in other words, education has meant the transmission of culture.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Classical education was only half the old system of European education--below it and above it there was the religious education that was common to the whole people, and the higher theological education that was peculiar to the clergy, who provided the majority of the teachers in both the other departments of education. Now the lowest level of this structure, which has been least studied and least regarded, was the most important of them all. It is true that it differed considerably in different parts of Europe, but for the religious rather than material reasons. In Protestant Europe it was founded on the Bible and the catechism, whereas in Catholic Europe it was based on the liturgy and on religious art and drama and mime, which made the Church the school of the people. But in either case it provided a system of common beliefs and moral standards, as well as the archetypal patterns of world history and sacred story which formed the background of their spiritual world.
Christopher Henry Dawson
The obvious difficulty that has prevented the study of European culture becoming a part of the regular curriculum of studies is its vastness and its complexity. The great advantage of classical education was the fact that it involved the study of only two languages and two literatures and histories. But European culture has produced about twenty vernacular literatures, and its history is spread out among an even larger number of political communities. At first sight it is an unmanageable proposition and we can understand how educationalists have so often come to acquiesce in a cultural nationalism which at least saved them from being overwhelmed by a multiplicity of strange tongues and unknown literatures. But the true method, it seems to me, is rather to find the consitutive factors of the European community and to make them the basis of our study.This means reversing the traditional nationalist approach which concentrated the student's attention on the distinctive characteristics of the national cultures and disregarded or passed lightly over the features that they shared in common. It means also that we should have to devote much more attention to the religious development, since it was in religion that Europe found its original basis of unity.
Christopher Henry Dawson
But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.
Eric Hobsbawm
We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, - nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, - not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the lory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth...and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion.
W.E.B. Du Bois
We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them.
Diane Ravitch
Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.
Jacques Barzun
Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department
Diane Ravitch
Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.
Diane Ravitch
American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?
Diane Ravitch
(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.
Thomas Carlyle
Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.
Michel Foucault
The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.
Stefan Collini
I follow the course marked out by my principles and, what is more, enjoy a deep and noble pleasure in following it. You deeply despise the human race, at least our part of it; you think it not only fallen but incapable of ever rising again... For my part, as I feel neither the right nor the wish to entertain such opinions of my species and my country, I think it is not necessary to despair of them. In my opinion, human societies, like individuals, amount to something only in liberty...And God forbid that my mind should ever be crossed by the thought that it is necessary to despair of success... You will allow me to have less confidence in your teaching than in the goodness and justice of God.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.
Stefan Collini
Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.
Stefan Collini
The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.
David McCullough
Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Where are we as a modern civilization if our educational institutions conspire to train only a fraction of our capacities? and if this is all they can really do, then why not acknowledge that fact openly and give legitimacy to the other alternative forms of education that do cultivate those neglected dimensions of personality, instead of pretending that anything lying outside the standards set by the Wester analytic tradition is either inferior, anti-intellectual, or diabolic? (p. 293-294)
Eugene Taylor
I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.
Howard Zinn
Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.
Howard Zinn
I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.
J. Rufus Fears
The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession — such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents — it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life.
Henry Adams
The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day.[Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]
Richard Rhodes
Thousands of persons, many of whom never darkened the door of a college, have learned to read books that most of our college graduates fear to tackle. teachers who understand this fact can help a student read the books that educated the Founding Fathers but not by explaining in lectures what the author would have said if he had been as bright as the lecturer.
Stringfellow Barr
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams
The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.
Hendrik Willem van Loon