* Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education and proper nutrition. -- Marian Wright Edelman

* "We must inoculate our children against militarism, by educating them in the spirit of pacifism... Our schoolbooks glorify war and conceal its horrors. They indoctrinate children with hatred. I would teach peace rather than war, love rather than hate." -- Albert Einstein “Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death” -- Albert Einstein

Only the educated are free.
-- Epictetus

* Unicef's education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures. -- Ralph Fiennes

 

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
-- Malcolm Forbes

* "A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins." -- Benjamin Franklin

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.
-- Anatole France

 

* Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. -- Paulo Freire

"People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills,and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)

 

* "The ultimate object of education should be, Gandhi said, to help create not only a balanced and harmonious individual but also a balanced and harmonious society where true justice prevails, where there is no unnatural division between the "haves" and the "have-nots," and where everybody is assured of a living wage and the right to live and the right to freedom." -- Arun Gandhi

* "If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children." -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained."
-- James A. Garfield (1880)

 

* "If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives." -- Danny Glover

"Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.” -- Emma Goldman “The most violent element in society is ignorance.” -- Emma Goldman * No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure." -- Emma Goldman

No one has ever died, from an overexposure to education.
-- Robert M. Hensel

We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse. -- E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

"...the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know."
-- John Holt

"If you look back in history, you will find the core mission of public education in America was to create places of civic virtue for our children and for our society. As education undergoes the rigors of re-examination and the need for reinvention, it is cruicial to remember that the key role of public schools is to preserve democracy and, that as battered as we might be, our mission is central to the future of this county."
-- Paul D. Houston, Executive director of the American Association of School Administrators

 

* "It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves." -- Robert Maynard Hutchins