What Education Means to Me

What Education Means to Me

by Nicole Garzaniti, Staff Writer Education... How can you explain education in just mere words? Education is anything and everything. It is singularly the most important thing we can do for ourselves.

As we near the 21st century, life continues to grow more advanced and complex. The only thing that separates us from complete insanity and utter poverty is the fact that because we can read and because we can write, we can handle and persevere in our jobs, our families, and in our everyday lives.

As a fourteen-year-old, I have yet to fully experience these responsibilities and obligations, but because I do live in a competitive world, and because I am constantly fighting to be the best and the brightest, I must go above and beyond all barriers and expectations if I want to achieve my goals.

No sports scholarship or funding will get me into Harvard or a successful law firm. If I want to reach these goals, it is all up to me. When I do achieve my goals, it will be because of the opportunity and determination that a good education has provided me.

To plan and achieve your goals in life is the best lesson you can learn and the most rewarding gift to yourself. Achieving life-long goals is the most gratifying and utterly satisfying thing any one person can accomplish.

Quotes on Education

The educational process has been the subject of much comment by academics and writers. Their observations range from praise to cynicism, mostly the latter. Education is an easy target for criticism because its stated aims are often so nobly ambitious that they have little chance of being realized. It should give us pause that so many people who have made their mark in the world of ideas, who have been acknowledged leaders and innovators, have held formal education and educational institutions in low regard. We have collected here a variety of thought-provoking observations on education.

First, some definitions of education.

Education is...

One of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.

William Lowe Bryan

Hanging around until you've caught on.

Robert Frost

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

Bertrand A. Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician, and writer.

Man's going forward from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty.

Kenneth G. Johnson

A form of self-delusion.

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor and printer.

[A process] which makes one rogue cleverer than another.

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) British poet and dramatist.

The inculcation of the incomprehensible into the ignorant by the incompetent.

Josiah Stamp

[Education] consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer.

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (1633-1695) English statesman and author.

Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.

Will Durant (1885-1981) U.S. author and historian.

A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British dramatist, critic, writer.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Norman Douglas

Education is the process of casting false pearls before real swine.

Prof. Irwin Edman

ABOUT EDUCATION

From clever definitions we move on to comments about education.

The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works.

Sherwood Anderson

Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little he can for his money.

Max Forman

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

Henry Brooks Adams (1828-1918) U.S. historian and writer. The Education of Henry Adams.

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) English novelist, dramatist

It has been said that we have not had the three R's in America, we had the six R's; remedial readin', remedial 'ritin' and remedial 'rithmetic.

Robert M. Hutchins

Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

John mason Brown

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) British historian

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) U.S. essayist and poet.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) American president

But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.

Saki (H. H. Munro) (1870-1916) Scottish author

Education