Critical Education Quotes & Sayings

[T]he more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing. — Sonia Sotomayor

The collective benefits of higher education will not be asserted unless the public can be engaged in defining them. A student's future returns on his or her personal investment of time and money will seem more critical than the public benefits to be derived from ensuring that all students become people of character as well as of competence. An institution's prowess in potentially lucrative lines of scientific research will seem more essential to its mission than its participation in the development of an aesthetically engaged and broadly humane society. Unless there is public discussion that can help support the balancing of public and private priorities, colleges and universities will dance only to the private ambitions that ensure continuing high levels of enrollment and high ratings in the various surveys of satisfaction that give institutions a boost in national rankings. — Ellen Condliffe Lagemann

Environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making. — Richard Louv

When the ability to have movement across social class becomes virtually impossible, I think it is the beginning of the end of a country. And because education is so critical to success in this country, if we don't figure out a way to create greater mobility across social class, I do think it will be the beginning of the end. — Shirley M. Tilghman

ultimately, the long-term goal is to have a critically informed public vote out of office representatives that are sacrificing children to the corporate bottom line with prepackaged teacher-proof curricula, standardized tests, and accountability schemes. — Pepi Leistyna

Building new connections is a critical part of building a new economy. The American education system, as flawed as it is, is great for the creative class because of the way it mixes up networks. — Danah Boyd

Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom. — Anne Elizabeth Moore

This tradition argues that education is not just about the passive assimilation of facts and cultural traditions, but about challenging the mind to become active, competent, and thoughtfully critical in a complex world. This model of education supplanted an older one in which children sat still at desks all day and simply absorbed, and then regurgitated, the material that was brought their way. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality. — Paulo Freire

P3- everywhere not only education but society as a whole needs deschooling. — Ivan Illich

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream. — Paul Hawken

One of the critical issues that we have to confront is illegal immigration, because this is a multi-headed Hydra that affects our economy, our health care, our health care, our education systems, our national security, and also our local criminality. — Allen West

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. — Jonathan Kozol

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Poor health was not just the result of random acts, bad luck, bad behavior or unfortunate genetics. Deliberate public policy decision about housing, education, parks and streets were the key drivers of racial differences in mortality. Crime kept people off the streets and limited their ability to exercise. The lack of grocery stores limited dietary choices. The lack of primary care doctors and specialists in these communities made chronic disease care more difficult. The degradation and loss of hospital services in these communities affected hospital-based outcomes. ... The chronic underfunding of critical health services at Cook County Hospital and other safety-net providers contributed to these poor outcomes as well. The deleterious impact of social structures such as urban poverty and racism on health has been called 'structural violence. — David A. Ansell

Learning is the first step in making positive changes within yourself. Other factors are conviction, determination, action & effort. Learning & education help develop conviction about the need to change & increase your commitment. Conviction then develops into determination. Next, strong determination leads to action: a sustained effort to implement the changes. This final factor of effort is critical. — Dalai Lama

I want to oppose the idea that the school has to teach directly that special knowledge and those accomplishments which one has to use later directly in life. The demands of life are much too manifold to let such a specialized training in school appear possible [ ... ] The development of general ability for independent thinking and judgement should always be placed foremost. — Albert Einstein

In the government schools, which are referred to as public schools, Indian policy has been instituted there, and its a policy where they do not encourage, in fact, discourage, critical thinking and the creation of ideas and public education. — Russell Means

It has been proven time and time again in countless studies that students who actively participate in arts education are twice as likely to read for pleasure, have strengthened problem-solving and critical thinking skills, are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement, four times more likely to participate in a math and science fair ... — Quincy Jones

The environment in Canada is much more conducive to doing critical work, though Canada has its own set of problems, but nothing like those emerging in the United States. Unlike Penn State which was a huge recipient of Pentagon funds, and was hostile to any criticism of its connection to the military and intelligence services, McMaster is a very open university that takes its commitment to a quality education and function as a democratic sphere very seriously. — Henry Giroux

After the privatization of public education everyone will get to choose a school that reflects only your own social values. No need for the competition of ideas or critical thinking. So the curriculum will be up to the school to determine. I am certain that the growing percentage of us who have McJobs will welcome this opportunity to spend a large portion of our income on education and choose an ideology at the same time. — David Friedrich Strauss

Teach For America provides one of the most critical pipelines for bringing new talent into public education. — Eli Broad

My three years at the NIH were critical in my scientific education. I learned an immense amount about the research process: developing assays, purifying macromolecules, documenting a discovery by many approaches, and writing clear manuscripts describing what is known and what remains to be investigated. — Stanley B. Prusiner

But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. "All that has been changed," cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical, and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune, the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of willful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness, and self-protective illusion. — H.G.Wells

One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures. We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying. Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, "a desire for a desire," when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be - a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires. Acquiring the tastes of a serious person is what we call education. Does it have a future? The advent of engineered, hyperpalatable mental stimuli compels us to ask the question. — Matthew B. Crawford

The impending teacher shortage is the most critical education issue we will face in the next decade. — David Price

Even if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize 'legacy' content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant ... Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of information in today's electronic society, which ... calls for an even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills
the very sort of 'legacy' content that teachers have focused on since classical times — Timothy VanSlyke

With the corporatization and privatization of higher education, it is increasingly more difficult for colleges and universities to expand and deepen democratic public life, produce engaged critical citizens, and operate as democratic public spheres. — Henry Giroux

The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. "The sharp luscious flavor, the fine aroma is fled," Hazlitt wrote, "and nothing but the stalk, the bran, the husk of literature is left." Terrible words, but it can happen. You become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets: "My characters are wooden! My plot creaks! I am pre-feminist, pre-deconstructivist, and pre-postcolonialist!" (The upside of English classes is that they give you critical tools, some of which are useful, but the downside is that those tools make you less able to shower your books with unconditional love. Conditions are the very thing you're asked to learn.) You read too many other books, and the currency of each one becomes debased. — Anne Fadiman

Schools need not preach political doctrine to defend democracy. If they shape men capable of critical thought and trained in social attitudes, that is all that is necessary. — Albert Einstein

The critical habit of thought, if usual in society, will pervade all its mores, because it is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be stampeded by stump orators ... They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens. — William Graham Sumner

Watch a man
say, a politician
being interviewed on television, an you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to give an answer even if there is none to give, even if you don't understand the question, even if the question contains erroneous assumptions, even if you are ignorant of the facts required to answer. Have you ever heard a man being interviewed say, "I don't have the faintest idea," or "I don't know enough even to guess," or "I have been asked that question before, but all my answers to it seem to be wrong?" One does not "blame" men, especially if they are politicians, for providing instant answers to all questions. The public requires that they do, since the public has learned that instant answer giving is the most important sign of an educated man. — Neil Postman

Why does the United States spend more than $20 billion a year on farm programs but less than $4 billion a year on education and early care for children in the critical first two years of life? Are corn and soybeans really a higher priority for America's future than our children? — Nicholas D. Kristof

Education is critical for people to become compassionate. If you don't know the problem and you don't know the reality, how can you help? — Marla Ruzicka

A true survivor is someone who, after 12+ years of being schooled, remains independent in their thinking. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

On this International Literacy Day, let us recall that literacy for all is an integral part of education for all, and that both are critical for achieving truly sustainable development for all. — Kofi Annan

Common Core reminds us what testing can do right. Modeled on standards of the world's education superpowers, questions demand critical thinking and creativity. Students are asked to write at length, show their work, and explain their reasoning. — Wendy Kopp

We believe that this initiative is a critical first step in our nation s effort to provide every student with a comprehensive, content rich and complete education. These standards have the potential to support teachers in achieving NEA s purpose of preparing students to thrive in a democratic society and a diverse, changing world as knowledgeable, creative and engaged citizens and lifelong learners. — Lily Eskelsen Garcia

What has become clear is that education for critical consciousness coupled with anti-racist activism that works to change all our thinking so that we construct identity and community on the basis of openness, shared struggle, and inclusive working together offers us the continued possibility of eradicating racism. — Bell Hooks

By cutting critical domestic programs such as education, health, environmental protection, and veterans' services, this budget reveals misplaced priorities. — Dan Lipinski

P14 - People educate each other through the mediation of the world — Paulo Freire

Economic progress and better education have directly resulted in the birth of a class of voters who are better informed, very demanding and highly critical. — Najib Razak

I think it a moral duty," she said. "If one inherits the privilege of wealth, or of education or good family, one must use that privilege wisely. Men speak of progress like a machine, an engine that rolls forward without human direction, pulling everyone with it. But that isn't true. If you read the newspapers" - the critical, adventurous, daring newspapers, not the conservative rags that her uncle favored - "it's easy to see that many get left behind. Many, in fact, get crushed. — Meredith Duran

Critical thinking is an important goal of a quality education; it refers to the ability to use cognitive skills and strategies to increase the probability of a desirable outcome. Diane Halpern is an expert on critical thinking and developing these skills, and we drew heavily on her writings. Critical thinking is logical, rational, and free of self-deception. — John D. Delamater

The connection between education and a healthy economy is critical. — Ted Strickland

To learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. — Jean Piaget

It is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within. — Bell Hooks

Shared governance is often the critical element that is missing in Asian universities, no matter how talented the faculty may be. Either it is ministries of education that are trying to run things, or in private institutions - those who control the funds. Neither group knows much about teaching and research. — Henry Rosovsky

The early removal from school of future officers of Britain's seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study of the theory of war or of planned objective, war's glorious art may have been glorious, but with individual exceptions, it was more or less mindless. — Barbara W. Tuchman

A good education teaches you how to ask a question. It's knowing what you don't know; the skills of critical thought. — Ted Sizer

Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the invaluable mental power we call judgment. — Sam Wineburg

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think. — Mary Wollstonecraft

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of the social state. — Henry Giroux

One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught. — Bryant McGill

These examples, and those that surround us every day, are why creational thinking, not critical thinking, should be our ultimate goal in education. Critical thinking is a skill that allows us to steer a valuable course through a known problem. It engages a problem-solving skill set but stops short of what is possible. If problem solving and critical thinking are the goals of education, the bar is too low. Creational thinking, the use of content while branching into the unknown, leads to the possibility of truly elegant solutions. That is where the bar needs to be, particularly in light of the challenges that lie ahead for us. — Grant Lichtman

I believe that our society's "mistake-phobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them. We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning. — Ray Dalio

The Animal Farm is a well written book in comprehensive english. George Orwell compares the communist Russian political system trying to make a point that that system was using people that didn't have a critical mind. What Orwell didn't see is that this attitude can be found in all the political systems where is no supervising and rotation of work.We see corruption in every country.Specialy in countries that are ruled by capitalism systems like Britain and America.I can't say that communism system was bad because people had free education and housing and they didn't have to borrow money from the bank. I believe that Orwell has been sarcastic and he was serving his country not the human race. — George Orwell

Education is critical not only to each one of us individually, but also to build the economic vitality of our state. — John Hoeven

Primary and especially secondary education is extremely important in preventing trafficking, it allows children to develop critical thinking skills to be able to defend themselves from traffickers and to have the skills that will enable them to have gainful employment to be able to support their families in other ways than being sexually exploited. — Mira Sorvino

The critical mind is too thin and cold, thinking itself will help little and reason will be of small avail; only the spirit of reasonableness, a sort of warm, glowing, emotional and intuitive thinking, joined with compassion, will insure us against a reversion to our ancestral type. Only the development of our life to bring it into harmony with our instincts can save us. I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas. — Lin Yutang

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. — Henry Doss

I ask that you offer to the political arena, and to the critical problems of our society which are decided therein, the benefit of the talents which society has helped to develop in you. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, whether you will be an anvilor a hammer. The question is whether you are to be a hammerwhether you are to give to the world in which you were reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of that education. — John F. Kennedy

Much of education today focuses on obedience skills rather than critical thinking skills. — Bryant McGill

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging. — Jane Smiley

To put it simply, we need to keep the arts in education because they instill in students the habits of mind that last a lifetime: critical analysis skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity and to solve problems, perseverance and a drive for excellence. Moreover, the creative skills children develop through the arts carry them toward new ideas, new experiences, and new challenges, not to mention personal satisfaction. This is the intrinsic value of the arts, and it cannot be overestimated. — Rod Paige

Many of my classmates have happier memories of Blessed Sacrament, and in time I would find my own satisfaction in the classroom. My first years there, however, I met with little warmth. In part, it was that the nuns were critical of working mothers, and their disapproval was felt by latchkey kids. The irony of course was that my mother wouldn't have been working such long hours if not to pay for that education she believed was the key to any aspirations for a better life. — Sonia Sotomayor

The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world's Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying 'guest fees' to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media - and not just The Washington Post - is where democracies conduct their civil wars. — David Mitchell

The weekly cartoons, as were my plays, came from a sense of criticism, criticism of the times, critical of the culture, of our manners and attitudes towards each other. The children's books come from the reverse. They're more supportive, since we're living in a time where we talk more about kids and do less, we talk about balancing the budget and we do it by cutting education. — Jules Feiffer

My film is actually very critical of the level of French we're using back home. To have an immigrant from an ancient French colony come and do that is a little critical of our education system back home. Balzac is definitely over their heads. It's meant to be funny also because it would be also probably too much for kids in France, but kids in France would know who Balzac is. But, back home at that age, I guarantee you they don't know who he is. — Philippe Falardeau

Economists who have studied the relationship between education and economic growth confirm what common sense suggests: The number of college degrees is not nearly as important as how well students develop cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and problem-solving ability. — Derek Bok

Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young — George Bernard Shaw

The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them. — Tom Heehler

Mentoring is all about people - it's about caring, about relationships and sensitivity. As it becomes increasingly in vogue it is becoming too formulated - concerned with performance metrics, critical success factors, investment and spending. It'll be a disaster. — Rene Carayol

Art is a critical component in a well-rounded education. Art is the level playing field - no matter how rich or poor, tall or short, pretty or ugly to the bone, if you can draw, you can find personal fulfillment and build self-confidence. Art is the highest achievement of mankind. — Lynda Resnick

Encouragement of higher education for our youth is critical to the success of our collective future. — Charles B. Rangel

The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. — Peter Medawar

A person's own opinion can sometimes be critical, which it could make difference in our society. — Saaif Alam

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical. — Alan Perlis