(3089/898) Education, etc.

1388) We must expect each student to strive for excellence in terms of the kind of excellence that is within their reach. We must recognise that there may be excellence or shoddiness in every line of human endeavour. We must learn to honour excellence no matter how humble the activity and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity: An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner
Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961)
posted by Tim Vorce [IQM] (10/10/1995)

1389) 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 W. Gardner (attributed)
posted by Tim Vorce [IQM] (10/10/1995)

1390) Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. [...] The human mind is our fundamental resource.

John F. Kennedy
"Special Message to the Congress on Education" (2/20/1961)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (10/10/1995)

1391) 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 the thoughts of other men.

Bill Beattie (widely attributed)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (10/10/1995)

1392) There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in.

Will Rogers (widely attributed)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (10/10/1995)

1393) It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young. Education should not aim at the passive awareness of dead facts, but at an activity directed towards the world that our efforts are to create. It should be inspired [...] by a shining vision of the society that is to be, of the triumphs that thought will achieve in the time to come, and of the ever-widening horizon of man's survey over the universe. Those who are taught in this spirit will be filled with life and hope and joy, able to bear their part in bringing to mankind a future less somber than the past, with faith in the glory that human effort can create.

Bertrand Russell
Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (1916)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (10/10/1995)

[Note: In A History of Western Philosophy (1945) Russell wrote: Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. [WQ]]

1394) Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness is the severest shock which the human system can sustain, and that if persistently sustained, it results in atrophy of function.

Jane Addams
Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910)
apparenty citing Thomas Huxley, source unknown
posted by Tim Vorce [IQM] (10/10/1995)

1395) The best kept secret in America today is that people would rather work hard for something they believe in than live a life of aimless diversion.

John W. Gardner (attributed)
posted by Tim Vorce [IQM] (10/10/1995)