Leaders Educational Observations Throughout History
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Importance of Academic Rigor

Desired Result

"...the idea that you can just have better training and then there are all these jobs, all these places where there are shortages and we just need the trained people is fundamentally an evasion." "The core problem is that there aren't enough jobs. If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won't get the jobs.
Lawrence Summers

"Education is an admirable thing, but is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." Oscar Wilde

"...developed a statistical model to predict MCAS  (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) scores..."  at different schools based on these socioeconomic characteristics “ ... percentage of families that receive aid to dependent children; have two parents; are below the poverty line; are white; and hold a college bachelor’s degree or higher. What we learned is that how well children perform on MCAS scores  has almost everything to do with parental socioeconomic backgrounds  and less to do with teachers, curricula, or what children learned in the classroom.”  Kevin J. Clancy, chairman and CEO of Copernicus, a global marketing consulting research firm  

"The secret in education lies in respecting the student." ―  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. James Baldwin

Do not train a child to learn by force of harshness; but direct them to it by what amused their minds so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each." Plato

"Try not to have a good time... this is supposed to be educational." C. Schulz

"To know how to suggest is the art of teaching" Henri-Frederic Amiel

"The better-performing students will  be treated much as chess prodigies are today" ... The lesser-performing students will specialize in receiving motivation."  Tyler Cowen

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. Abraham Maslow

We must maximize the minimum for students with average special intelligence while maximizing the maximum for students with really high specially intelligence. We also must minimize the maximum regret that our current system does not do well as demonstrated by drop outs who don't think of education as a gift of opportunity Walter Antoniotti editor

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you don't stop." Confucius .D.

F.D.R. was neither an outstanding student nor athlete, but he entered enthusiastically into life at Groton
At Harvard he put much of his energy into his social life and extracurricular activities'  Source

"I have never let schooling interfere
with  my education" Mark Twain

"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."  Leonardo da Vinci

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well top remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." Oscar Wilde

"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon." E. M. Forster

"Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results." John Dewey

Importance of Books

The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women. Booker T. Washington

“The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.” Sam Weinberg

The most important thing about education is appetite. Winston Churchill

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."  Plutarch

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." R. Frost

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived." Joan Robinson

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
Abe Lincoln

“Education is no substitute for intelligence." Frank Herbert

In 1914, J. A. Smith, Moral Philosophy Professor at Oxford, began his two-year lecture course as follows:

“Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”