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.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curious of inquiry. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing. We find it easier to add a new study or course or kind of school than to recognize existing conditions so as to meet the need.

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers groceries causes change in our nutrition.

We are only now on the threshold of knowing the range of the educatability of man -- the perfectibility of man. We have never addressed ourselves to this problem before.

The primary purpose of education is not to teach you to earn your bread, but to make every mouthful sweeter.

To impress others we must be earnest; to amuse them, it is only necessary to be kindly and fanciful.