Education

Gripping and enduring interests frequently grow out of initial learning efforts that are not appealing or attractive.
~ William Chandler Bagley

There is a tremendous dissatisfaction with public education -- an almost desperate resolve on the part of many people. They say that these are their children, and these are their few years in their one life on this earth; we're not going to let them lose their souls, or become uneducated, or pick up the terribly adverse cultural influences which are found in public education. There is a recognition that the moral atmosphere is very, very bad.
~ William Bentley Ball, in The Catholic World Report (Interview; August/September 1995)

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.
~ Bill Beattie

Education is, after all, a serious business. Its lifeblood is standards. If there are no standards, how do we call something higher education?
~ William John Bennett, Speech at the University of Notre Dame (1 October 1990).

Most certification today is pure "credentialism." [It] must begin to reflect our demand for excellence, not our appreciation of parchment.
~ William John Bennett, in The New York Times (3 September 1986).

The act of sex involves deep springs of conduct. It is serious. It has complicated and profound repercussions. And if we're going to deal with it in school, we'd better know this and acknowledge it. Otherwise, we should not let our schools have anything to do with it. To make sex out to be something less powerful than it is, as our present sex-ed programs usually do, is just as much a dodge as denying the importance of sex. We serve children neither by denying their sexuality nor by making it a thing of no moral account.
~ William John Bennett, in National Review (3 July 1987). Why Johnny Can't Abstain

[The shortage of student loans] may require . . . divestiture of certain sorts -- stereo divestiture, automobile divestiture, three-weeks-at-the-beach divestiture.
~ William John Bennett, in The New York Times (12 February 1985).

But to go to school in a summer morn,
Oh, it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day --
In sighing and dismay.
~ William Blake, The Schoolboy

It's an insane tragedy that 700,000 people get a diploma each year and can't read the damned diploma.
~ William E. Brock III, quoted in The New York Times (14 January 1987).

. . . one of the most striking characteristics of our progressive education system is the obscurity of its aims and objectives.
~ William Brooks, The History and Social Science Teacher (1975). Some Reflections on Canadian Education

The development of appropriate educational policy can be crucial to the well-being of a society. Policy developers should not become unwitting slaves to other men's ideas especially when those ideas may become destructive of the goals and purposes of the very societies they seek to serve. . . . Before change and a shift to more appropriate policy is possible, the slaves [to current education idealogy] must be set free.
~ William Brooks, in The St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning (January 1994). Was Dewey a Marxist?

The educational community should never surrender its right to dissent and raise questions about the nature of our culture. The longing to play a role in the development of a good and just society remains one of the highest and most valuable motivations of the teacher. But in the shadow of so many twentieth century societies that have been fractured, vulgarized and impoverished by Marxist ideology, it may be time to begin a more open discourse about the sources of thought that set the agenda for our schools.
~ William Brooks, in The St. Lawrence Institute for the Advancement of Learning (January 1994). Was Dewey a Marxist?

A college education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.
~ William Lowe Bryan

I am for those who see our University as it is with all its wrinkles and scars, and who therefore also know it at its best -- its resolute integrity, its unworded oath of allegiance to the whole truth, its century of path-making for the children of the wilderness toward the fullness of civilized life, its passion for a clean and just democracy.
~ William Lowe Bryan, Speech at Indiana University (1916). Patriotism for Indiana

The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

Benevolence is short-sighted, indeed, and must blame itself for failure, if it do not see in education the chief interest of the human race.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), in The Christian Examiner (November 1833). Remarks on Education

[T]he ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. . . . He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins.
~ William Ellery Channing (D.D.), An Introductory Address to the Franklin Lectures, Boston MA (1838). Self-Culture

School days, school days; dear old golden rule days.
Readin' and 'ritin' and 'rithmetic; taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick.
~ Will D. Cobb, School Days (1907 song lyric)

But all they want to do
Is tie the poem to a chair with rope
And torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.
~ Billy Collins, in Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001). Introduction to Poetry

Ay 'tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an university: but the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.
~ William Congreve, Love for Love (1695). Act 5, scene 3

Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.
~ William Johnson Cory, in Eton Reform (1861).

And I was a physical education major with a child psychology minor at Temple, which means if you ask me a question about a child's behavior, I will advise you to tell the child to take a lap.
~ Bill Cosby, Fatherhood (1986). Chapter 2

For public schools 'tis public folly feeds.
~ William Cowper, Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools (1784).

In colleges and halls, in ancient days,
When learning, virtue, piety, and truth
Were precious, and inculcated with care,
There dwelt a sage call'd Discipline..
~ William Cowper, The Task (1785). Book II. The Time-Piece

The sounding jargon of the schools.
~ William Cowper, from The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper (1842). Truth (written in 1782)

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.
~ George William Curtis

This town being the only seat of learning immediately under the patronage of the public, possessing the advantages of a central situation, on some of the most public roads in the state, in a plentiful country and excelled by few places in the world either for beauty of situation or salubrity of air, promises with all moral certainty to be a place of growing and permanent importance.
~ William Richardson Davie, Letter Describing the Site of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (25 September 25 1793).

The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue -- questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom.
~ William Orville Douglas

In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey.
~ William Duane, in the Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (1822).

Education must not simply teach work -- it must teach Life.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, The Talented Tenth (1903).

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, 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 knowl- edge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
~ William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Chapter V. Of the Wings of Atalanta

Graduate students are petrified. As an undergraduate you say what's on your mind, you rap with the teacher. But in graduate school you pronounce yourself a professional -- this is what you do for a living. You're petrified to be wrong.
~ David William Duchovny, Playboy Interview: David Duchovny (December 1998).

He had been rejected from military service. He had weak ribs. He had poor eyes. He was flatfooted. He was a professor.
~ William James "Will" Durant

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
~ William James "Will" Durant, in Time Magazine (13 August 1965). The Essence of the Centuries

All good school-work ought . . . to reach the parents through the children, particularly in the lessons on hygiene, co-operation, manners, and ethics.
~ Charles William Eliot, in Harper and Brothers The Children's Educational Theatre (1911), Introduction

One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long.
~ Charles William Eliot

We have in America the largest public school system on earth. . . . One trouble has been its negative character. It has aimed at the repression of faults rather than the creation of virtues.
~ William Herbert Perry Faunce

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get.
~ William Feather

You can always tell a Harvard man -- but you can't tell him very much.
~ William Feather

Let each of us think of our own homes, of the villages in which we have to live, of the towns in which it is our lot to be busy; and do we not know child after child -- boys or girls -- growing up to probable crime, to still more probable misery, because badly taught or utterly untaught? Dare we, then, take on ourselves the responsibility of allowing this ignorance and this weakness to continue one year longer than we can help?
~ William Edward (W.E.) Forster, Speech introducing the Elementary Education Bill, House of Commons, Hansard (17 February 1870)

Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches. The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeoisie ideology. The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new socialist society.
~ William Z. Foster, Toward Soviet America (1932).

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations.
~ J. William Fulbright, Speech to the Council for International Education (1983).

But if we believe what we profess concerning the worth of the individual, then the idea of individual development within a framework of ethical purpose must become our deepest concern, our national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession. We must think of education as relevant for everyone everywhere -- at all ages and in all conditions of life.
~ John William Gardner

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
~ John William Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
~ John William Gardner

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
~ John William Gardner

We don't even know what skills may be needed in the years ahead. That is why we must train our young people in the fundamental fields of knowledge, and equip them to understand and cope with change. That is why we must give them the critical qualities of mind and durable qualities of character that will serve them in circumstances we cannot now even predict.
~ John William Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).

There are as many fools at a university as anywhere. . . . But their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp -- the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.
~ William Alexander Gerhardie, Polyglots (1925).

If we are to persuade all students to do quality work, we must involve them deeply in the process of evaluating their own work as they do it! This is concurrent evaluation.
~ William Glasser, M.D., The Quality School Teacher (1993).

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.
~ William Glasser, M.D.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking. . . .
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797). Of Choice In Reading

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.
~ William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature in a Series of Essays (1797).

Refer them to reading, to conversation, to meditation; but teach them neither creeds nor catechisms, either moral or political.
~ William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).

In our presence is a culture that is out of control. Education is the cure.
~ William Herbert Gray III, (June 1991)

Education is not learning, but the training of the mind that it may learn.
~ William Withey Gull, in A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull, Volume 1 (1894).

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.
~ Sir William John Haley

You cannot measure a love for learning
or a joy of knowledge
or a passion for life. . . .
You can't measure those things with a standardized test
but you can sure kill them.
~ Bill Harley, NPR commentary (June 2001).

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
~ William Torrey Harris, The Philosphy of Education (1889).

Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. . . . The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
~ William Torrey Harris (1889), Quoted in The Tyranny of Government Schooling (1992).

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. . . . It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
~ William Torrey Harris, The Philosphy of Education (1889).

Any one 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.
~ William Hazlitt, Table Talk, Essays on Men and Manners (1821-1822). On the Ignorance of the Learned

Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.
~ William Hazlitt, from The Round Table (1817).

Education is the art of making men ethical.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (1821). Third Part: Ethical Life

Many of the new critics [of liberal-arts education] have a hostile view of traditional scholarship and seem to judge ideas by their "political correctness" -- that is, on the basis of whom they may offend.
~ William A. Henry, (1 April 1991).

Inevitably many students of limited talent spend huge amounts of time and money pursuing some brass ring occupation, only to see their dreams denied. As a society we consider it cruel not to give them every chance at success. It may be more cruel to let them go on fooling themselves.
~ William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (1994).

There will be no educational reform until there is a connection between how well the children do and the incentives which drive the educational establishment.
~ William J. Hume

The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.
~ William Ralph (Dean) Inge, in Cambridge Essays on Education (1917). The Training of the Reason

Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). The Laws of Habit

Education is the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior.
~ William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (March 1899). Education and Behavior

Organization and method mean much, but contagious human characters mean more in a university, where a few undisciplinables . . . may be infinitely more precious than a faculty full of orderly routinists.
~ William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you how to recognize and how to hang onto a good man when you see one.
~ William James

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
~ William James

The aim of 'Science' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a cease-less compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors.
~ William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Vol. 2. Chapter XIX: The Perception Of 'Things'

If I had my way, I would have the Book of Genesis taught in all our elementary schools.
~ Bill Keith, Address in Monroe, LA (1986).

It is tiresome to hear education discussed, tiresome to educate, and tiresome to be educated.
~ William Lamb (2nd Viscount, Lord Melbourne)

Others are musing, in cogitation profound, on the arrangement of a syllogism, while they ought to be guiding the tail of a plow.
~ William Livingston, A Letter to the Right Reverend Father in God, John, Lord Bishop of Landaff (1768).

One of the unfortunate things about our education system is that we do not teach students how to avail themselves of their subconscious capabilities.
~ Bill Lear

Education is not concerned primarily with intellectual luxuries, but with elements which make the individual a valuable member of society.
~ William Mather Lewis

Wash your hands always before you come to school.
~ William Masher, (1681).

One of the chief defects in our plan of education in this country is that we give too much attention to developing the memory and too little to developing the mind; we lay too much stress on acquiring knowledge and too little on the wide application of knowledge.
~ William James Mayo, M.D., Collected Papers Mayo Clinic, Mayo Foundation (1933). The economic relation of the university system to the development of a social democracy.

Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1888). Things the Germans Lack

Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought -- they themselves no longer think.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The educational system in large states will always be mediocre at best, for the same reason that the cooking in large kitchens is at best mediocre.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878).

To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? Seek zeros!
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1888). Maxims and Arrows

Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study than a student.
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

The higher education so much needed today is not given in the school, is not to be bought in the market place, but it has to be wrought out in each one of us for himself; it is the silent influence of character on character.
~ William Osler

The higher the standard of education in a profession, the less marked will be the charlatanism.
~ William Osler

The student often resembles the poet -- he is born, not made.
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
~ William Osler, Farewell address given to American and Canadian Medical students, McGill University (1892). The Student Life

No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
~ Judge William R. Overton, (overturning Arkansas Act 590, requiring public schools to teach Creation Science).

Advanced education may or may not make men and women more efficient; but it enriches personality, increases the wealth of the mind, and hence brings happiness.
~ William Lyon ("Billy") Phelps, Happiness (August 1927).

Unlike university or public libraries, elementary and secondary school libraries are not designed for freewheeling inquiry; they are tailored . . . to the teaching of basic skills and ideas . . .
~ William H. Rehnquist (dissenting opinion), Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982).

Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.
~ Frederick William (F.W.) Robertson

The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.
~ Will Rogers

The schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
~ Will Rogers

There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
~ Will Rogers

There is only one thing that can kill the movies, and that is education. . . . Some say, what is the salvation of the movies? I say, run 'em backward. It can't hurt 'em and it's worth a trial.
~ Will Rogers, in The Autobiography of Will Rogers (1949). Chapter 6

Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Every university teacher should be himself engaged in research, and should have sufficient leisure and energy to know what is being done in his subject in all countries. In university, skill in pedagogy is no longer important; what is important is knowledge of one's subject and keenness about what is being done in it.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926). The University

It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930). Impersonal Interests

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, from Sceptical Essays (1928). Free Thought and Official Propaganda

I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun.
~ Willy Russell

Public schools promote civic rather than individual pursuits. . . . We must focus on creating citizens for the good of society. . . . Each child belongs to the state.
~ William H. Seawell, (1981)

The whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
~ William Shakespeare, As You Like It

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot,
Or found a mind I did not doubt,
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
~ William De Witt (W.D.) Snodgrass, Heart's Needle (1959). April Inventory

They wear their godhead lightly.
They look out from their hill and say,
To themselves, "We have nowhere to go but down;
The great destination is to stay."
~ William De Witt (W.D.) Snodgrass, from Selected Poems 1957-1987 (1987). The Campus on the Hill

Outcomes-based education means clearly focusing and organizing everything in an educational system around what is essential for all students to be able to do successfully at the end of their learning experiences. This means starting with a clear picture of what is important for students to be able to do, then organizing the curriculum, instruction and assessment to make sure this learning ultimately happens.
~ William G. Spady, Outcomes Based Education: Critical Issues and Answers (1994).

Our faith in the power of book learning is excessive and unfounded. It is a superstition of the age. The education which forms character and produces faith in sound principles of life comes through personal influence and example. It is borne on the mores.
~ William Graham Sumner, Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (1906).

The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.
~ William Temple (archbishop), The Hope of a New World (1941).

Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income -- which he then spends sending his son to college.
~ William E. "Bill" Vaughan

Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change.
Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding.
~ William Arthur Ward

At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own.
~ Bill Watterson, Speech at Kenyon College Commencement, Gambier, Ohio (20 May 1990). Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled

If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vim and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow.
~ William Allen White, Editorial in The Emporia Gazette (8 April 1932). Student Riots

In education we are striving not to teach youth to make a living, but to make a life.
~ William Allen White

Education is the mother of leadership.
~ Wendell Lewis Wilkie

Nothing should be overlooked in fighting for better education. Be persistent and ornery: this will be good for the lethargic educational establishment and will aid the whole cause of public education.
~ Roy Wilkins

In the 1940s a survey listed the top seven discipline problems in public schools: talking, chewing gum, making noise, running in the halls, getting out of line, wearing improper clothes, and not putting paper in wastebaskets. A more recent survey lists these top seven: drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery, and assault. (Arson, gang warfare, and venereal disease are also-rans).
~ George F. Will

It is a matter of the highest importance that a College should be rightly located.
~ S.H. Willey

Debates over assessments, vouchers, and federal, state, and local control are secondary to the real issues. Helping children achieve also requires a willingness to question whether today's classrooms are set up to meet children's individual needs as developing readers and writers.
~ Carmelita K. Williams, International Reading Association Press Release (26 January 2001). International Reading Association Welcomes Bush Administration's Proposed Debate on "Closing the Achievement Gap"

For various reasons, education is being driven towards an increasing concentration on the technical and the commercial, to a point at which any more reflective enquiry may come to seem unnecessary and archaic, something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.
~ Bernard Williams, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Annual Lectures (2000). Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline

A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants. . . .
~ Raymond Henry Williams

So the civic responsibility of education is to teach us how to be a person for others. To be a person for others, we must learn how to serve the community. To be a person for others, we must learn how to sacrifice on behalf of the community. To be a person for others, we must learn how to suffer with others in the community. . . . In summary, the civic responsibility of education teaches us to serve, sacrifice for, and suffer with people in community. And let me tell you a secret: There is no other route to personal success except this one.
~ Charles V. Willie, Address to Certificate Recipients at Harvard College, Cambridge MA (6 June 1996). The Civic Responsibility of Education Proclaimed

Classes and curricula are structured in such a way that faculty and students alike will remain as much strangers to one another when we leave the university as when we arrived.
~ William H. Willimon, in "A Report to the President, and the Provost and the Vice President for Student Life of Duke University" (1993). We Work Hard, We Play Hard

In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity -- or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity -- by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
~ Angus Wilson

Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?
~ Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).

The university of the air.
~ Harold Wilson (an early term for the Open University), in Glasgove Herald (9 September 1963).

In my opinion, much of the so-called science of "education" was invented as a necessary mechanism for enabling semi-educated people to act as tolerable teachers.
~ Sloan Wilson

I consider the cause of education as the cause of my country; for the youth, who are now at their studies, will soon compose that country.
~ William Wirt, An Address Before the Peithessophian and Philoclean Societies of Rutgers College (20 July 1830).

Librarians are the last licensed generalists in academe.
~ William Wisner

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows,
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
~ William Butler Yeats, from The Wild Swans at Coole (1917). The Scholars (1929 version)

Education is not filling a pail, but lighting a fire.
~ William Butler Yeats

[W]e ought to be able to give the child of the poor as good an education as we give to the child of the rich.
~ William Butler Yeats, Speech Before The Senate of Ireland on the School Attendance Bill (24 March 1926).