My Boarding School Blog

Their Take on Education

Curious about what respected historical icons think about quality education? Read on and be inspired.

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
~ Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher; prominent classical liberal political theorist; and sociological theorist.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
~ H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells (September 21, 1866 – August 13, 1946), better known as H. G. Wells, was a prolific English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Doctor Moreau.

One can never consent to creep when one feels the compulsion to soar.
~ Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to graduate from college.

What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.
~ John Holt

John Caldwell Holt (April 14, 1923 – September 14, 1985) was an American author and educator, one of the best known proponents of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
~ Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), also known as T.R., was the twenty-sixth President of the United States, and a leader of the Republican Party and of the Progressive Movement. He became the youngest President in United States history at the age of 42.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else.
~ Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) 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.”

Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
~ Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (Can) (30 November 1874–24 January 1965) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army. A prolific author, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his own historical writings.

Quotes Source. Biography Reference.