By Lois E. Wilson
I have written before about my philosophy of education. I recently read a quote from John Dewey (1859-1952), an influential American educator which inspired me to write about it again.
I wanted to explore what others had said about education. In these days of CRT (Critical Race Theory) and “progressive” curricula being forced upon students in the classroom, their parents are struggling to have input and be heard about concerns.
Cited below are diverse thoughts about education and life:
The direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life. (Plato)
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 Russell)
Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be “socialized.” (Robert Lindner)
School is a place through which you have to pass before entering life, but where the teaching proper does not prepare you for life. (Ernest Dimnet)
The function of the university is not strongly to teach bread winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a center of public society; it is above all, to be the organ of that adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. (W. E. B. Du Bois)
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real. (George Bernard Shaw)
My thought about educations is: “All our lives we are learners and teachers of what we’ve learned.”
Dewey said it better: ”Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
© 2021 Lois E. Wilson