Adult Education Quotes & Sayings

Being born into a prosperous middle-class family typically endows you with a safety net for life. If you are not naturally very bright, you are still likely to go far and, at the very least, will never experience poverty as an adult. A good education compounded by your parents' 'cultural capital', financial support and networks will always see you through. If you are a bright child born into a working-class family, you do not have any of these things. The odds are that you will not be better off than your parents. — Owen Jones

There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers. — William Damon

Adult males in modern society who feel fulfilled in giving concern and tuition to boys and youths are portrayed as being interested only in boys' bodies (though this may be a small part of the attraction) and are spurned and traduced as sexual monsters. I believe we reap the harvest of ours hysterical and homophobia today in juvenile crime, drug use and delinquency. Consider the ethical training which boys and youths gained through shudo in Japan or in the system in Classical Greece, the tuition in manners, customs and humanity, the degree of civilised values imparted to them, the ideas of loyalty, honour and truthfulness; this highly personalised education with love and sensuality at its centre must be far more effective than any other. We in the West are bigoted fools to dismiss it with such horror. — Colin Spencer

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. — David Foster Wallace

An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected. — Thomas Moore

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. — David Foster Wallace

There are many who occasionally attend church and who are trying experimentally to be Christians, yet are unable to identify well or define accurately the central truths of Christian teaching. The knowledge they have of the Christian tradition may have come chiefly through hymns. Their strong and sincere feelings are not matched with serious biblical or historical reflection on those feelings. Religious feelings are, indeed, crucial to the deeper learning of Christian truth, but they easily become superficial and narcissistic if the mind of Christ is not a mentor to natural religious impulse. The loss of center in Christian education is arguably due to a serious default of pastoral leadership; when the teaching elder does not teach, the effect is felt throughout the entire Christian congregation. — Thomas C. Oden

Reforming public education, cutting property taxes, fixing adult and child protective services and funding our budget can all occur when Democrats and Republicans engage in consensus and cooperation - not cynicism and combat. — Rick Perry

I feel like in America, we don't have a kid problem. You think about all these issues that these kids are dealing with, we have an adult problem. We have adults that do not place the priority on our kids to get a valuable education. — Alonzo Mourning

I didn't have any qualms. I'm used to taking my clothes off in front of strangers. I've done it since I was 14 - with my mother's adult education art classes. She liked to paint and I went along as a life model. — Alex Kingston

We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth. — Kenneth Keniston

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. — Alan Turing

I do believe young people should be obligated to try different types of music - that is what education is. But once you're in a situation as an adult, it doesn't benefit anybody - at least in my experience - to force music on people that they don't like or do not have an interest in - whether it's three-hundred years old or newly written. — Michael Hersch

A boy, if he's lucky, discovers his limitations across a leisurely passage of years, with a self-awareness arriving slowly. That way, at least he has plenty of time to heroically imagine himself first. Most boys unfold in this natural, measured way, growing up with at least one adult on the scene who can convincingly fake being all-powerful, omniscient, and unfailingly protective for a kid's first decade or so, providing an invaluable canopy of reachable stars and monsters that are comfortably make-believe. — Ron Suskind

If I had to make a general rule for living and working with children, it might be this: be wary of saying or doing anything to a child that you would not do to another adult, whose good opinion and affection you valued. — John Holt

Each and every child in this country is valuable because they are our future as a society. We cannot afford to lose a single child to ill-health, under-education, abuse, addiction, jail, or gun violence. America's highest goal should be for every child to grow up to be a successful young adult
healthy, educated, free, secure, and a good citizen. — John F. Kerry

This is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. — David Foster Wallace

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away. — David Brooks

She would initiate three "races to the top" from the federal level - with prizes of $100 million, $75 million, and $50 million - to vastly accelerate innovations in social technologies: Which state can come up with the best platform for retraining workers? Which state can design a pilot city or community of the future where everything from self-driving vehicles and ubiquitous Wi-Fi to education, clean energy, affordable housing, health care, and green spaces is all integrated into a gigabit-enabled platform? Which city can come up with the best program for turning its public schools into sixteen-hour-a-day community centers, adult learning centers, and public health centers? We need to take advantage of the fact that we have fifty states and hundreds of cities able to experiment and hasten social innovation. In — Thomas L. Friedman

I can think of another quickie education for a child, which, in its way, is almost as salutary: Meeting a human being who is tremendously respected by the adult world, and realizing that that person is actually a malicious lunatic. — Kurt Vonnegut

You speak baby gibberish?' asked Jack.
'Fluently. The adult-education center ran a course, and I have a lot of time on my hands.'
'So what did he say?'
'I don't know.'
'I thought you said you spoke gibberish?'
'I do. But your baby doesn't. I think he's speaking either
pre-toddler nonsense, a form of infact burble or an obscure dialect of
gobbledygook. In any event, I can't understand a word he's saying.'
'Oh. — Jasper Fforde

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition. — C.S. Lewis

Despite this lamentable lack of balance in our education I do not believe that either children or adults in my country are permeated by a widespread hostility to Germany. — Douglas Hurd

The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. — John Cheever

A democratic society must seek to give every young person, whether native-born or newcomer, the knowledge and skills to succeed as an adult. In a political system that relies on the participation of informed citizens, everyone should, at a minimum, learn to speak, read and write a common language. Those who would sustain our democratic life must understand its history. Tailoring children's education to the color of their skin, their national origins, or their presumed ethnicity is in some fundamental sense contrary to our nation's founding ideals of democracy, equality and opportunity. — Diane Ravitch

Babies learn most of what they know from interactions with their parents, but not of the formal, instructional variety. Babies learn from spontaneous, everyday events
the mailman at the door with a package to open ... all of which need adult interpretation. They are real events of interest and concern to babies and young children ... By contrast, infant education is artificial and out of context. — Sandra Scarr

I saw a cartoon that describes this. A head of iceberg lettuce is sitting in a garden saying, "Oh, no, how did I get in this vegetable garden again? I wanted to be a wildflower!" The caption reads, "Oscar is born again as a head of iceberg lettuce in order to overcome his fear of being eaten." One can think from a bigger perspective than this whole notion of reward and punishment. You could see your life as an adult education course. Some of the curriculum you like and some you don't like; some of what comes up you find workable, some you don't. That's the curriculum for attaining enlightenment. The question is, how do you work with it? — Pema Chodron

My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs - in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence. — Daniel Goleman

He was confronted at an early age with adult-strength realizations about powerlessness, desperation, and distrust, taking his dose right alongside the overwhelmed adults. This steady stream of shocks and realizations leaves so many boys raised in poor, urban areas stumbling toward manhood with a hardened exterior masking deep insecurities. — Ron Suskind

Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year. — H.W. Brands

A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society. — Maria Montessori

I mean
no offense, Leonard, but you really don't like to climb ropes, and get into the Marine Corps, and kill your countriy's enemies, do you?"
I said that it wasn't one of the big goals of my life.
"Well, maybe you'd like me to get you into this corrective gym class, where you can study toe dancing, and grow up to be a little Commie, sissy boy," Mr. Jerris said.
I told him I would like that just fine ... — Daniel Pinkwater

In every adult there lurks a child - an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole. — Carl Jung

Purple Mike promises to be an intriguing read that will teach anyone who wants to know about the highs and lows of drug addiction. Purple Mike is a legal, natural high. Enjoy reading. — Sin Mils

Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They're smart, funny, creative people, but they're people. — Charlie Korsmo

If you don't know your history, you don't know what you are talking about! — Barbara Ann Mojica

The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning. — Carl Rogers

The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a "new creation", capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him. — Pope Benedict XVI

We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts. — Malcolm X

Take a child & teach him physics his first 7 grades of education, I submit he'd excel to a savant-like level. Imagine adult focus for 7 yrs. — Ace Antonio Hall

But, on the other hand, the study of music is one of the best ways to learn about human nature. This is why I am so sad about music education being practically nonexistent today in schools. Education means preparing children for adult life; teaching them how to behave and what kinds of human beings they want to be. Everything else is information and can be learned in a very simple way. To play music well you need to strike a balance between your head, your heart, and your stomach. And if one of the three is not there or is there in too strong a dose, you cannot use it. What better way than music to show a child how to be human? — Edward W. Said

When children do not have three square meals a day, a proper education, and at least one adult who they know loves and is committed to them, it's very unlikely they will grow up to be productive citizens of the world. — Stephanie March

As a child, we let go of the past easily but not as an adult. As a child, we changed one grade after another without complaints and with eagerness, but now we are changing our grade every day, but without joy and with great dismay. — Debasish Mridha

I would not have put it this way in those days, but because I was born a woman, I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. I would always be
a unit in a vast beehive. I might have a decent life, but I would be dependent - always - on someone treating me well.
I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it, and now I could see it, smell it in the air around me: the kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood. — Phyllis Schlafly

...a school's worth should be measured not by how its students perform on standardized tests but by how well they function as adult graduates of the school... — Terry Roberts

Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child. — Peter Schjeldahl

Education is no longer thought of as a preparation for adult life, but as a continuing process of growth and development from birth until death. — Stephen Mitchell

It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote A Passage to India. The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life
if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education
is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there. — Nick Hornby

The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has - I'm not kidding. — J.D. Salinger

It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world. — Timothy B. Tyson

Intelligence plus experience creates ideas, and experimentation with that form of chemistry-the contact of ideas with events-is the field of adult education. — Felix Morley

I think also, that general virtue is more probably to be expected and obtained from the education of youth, than from exhortations of adult persons; bad habits and vices of the mind being, like diseases of the body, more easily prevented than cured. I think moreover, that talents for the education of youth are the gift of God; and that he on whom they are bestowed, whenever a way is opened for use of them, is as strongly called as if he heard a voice from heaven. — Benjamin Franklin

I believe that everyone has expertise to sell and that people want to purchase that knowledge in a convenient way. Just as Airbnb made people realize that an extra room in their home or apartment can be a source of income, the new Learning Annex provides a platform for people to monetize their knowledge. It's an exciting time for online adult education and our new platform is the way to unify an otherwise fragmented market. — Bill Zanker

A college education feeds an adolescent in one end and gets a young adult out the other. In the process of those four years that person has changed significantly, and you and I have been agents of that change ... what happens, in the course of what we do, is soul making. — Leroy S Rouner

The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed. — Hannah Arendt

Youth is to wander! Adult is to act! Age is to assimilate the beauty of thoughts. — Debasish Mridha

An adult friend of Lincoln's: Life was to him a school. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education. — Bertrand Russell

There are thus two tasks for the Mass Media division of Unesco, the one general, the other special. The special one is to enlist the press and the radio and the cinema to the fullest extent in the service of formal and adult education, of science and learning, of art and culture. The general one is to see that these agencies are used both to contribute to mutual comprehension between different nations and cultures, and also to promote the growth of a common outlook shared by all nations and cultures. — Julian Huxley

Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... but for me and no one else, education means making creators ... You have to make inventors, innovators ... not conformists — Jean Piaget

Today, 8 million adult Americans, more than the entire population of Michigan, have not finished 5 years of school. Nearly 20 million have not finished 8 years of school. Nearly 54 million - more than one-quarter of all America - have not even finished high school. — Lyndon B. Johnson