What Genius Thinks of Education
As I compiled the thoughts from geniuses last week, one group of thoughts that I left out – simply because there were so many of them – were the thoughts of geniuses on the subject of regimented education. Thus, today’s list.
Again in this area, the brightest men and women reach a surprisingly consistent set of conclusions. And again, we’ll begin with Einstein:
Albert Einstein
- It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
- School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like sergeants. I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam… I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement.
- I learned mostly at home, first from my uncle and then from a student who came to eat with us once a week. He would give me books on physics and astronomy.
- Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Baruch Spinoza
- Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them.
Marshall McLuhan
- Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
Ivan Illich
- School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.
Bertrand Russell
- Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
Mary Wollstonecraft
- There is not, perhaps, in the kingdom, a more dogmatical, or luxurious set of men, than the pedantic tyrants who reside in colleges and preside at public schools.
Agatha Christie
- I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.
- A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.
Celia Green
- Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society.
- It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them equally clever, so teaching methods are adopted which make it practically impossible for anyone to learn anything.
John Stuart Mill
- A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
Ludwig von Mises
- Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it.
H.L. Mencken
- The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
Sigrid Undset
- I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.
Abraham Mazlow
- We know that children are capable of peak experiences and that they happen frequently during childhood. We also know that the present school system is an extremely effective instrument for crushing peak experiences and forbidding their possibility. The natural child-respecting teacher who is not frightened by the sight of children enjoying themselves is a rare sight in classrooms.
Isaac Asimov
- Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Boris Sidis
- Our young generation is trained by fear into discipline and obedience. We thus suppress the natural genius and originality of the child, we favor and raise mediocrity, and cultivate the philistine, the product of education, ruled by rod, not by thought.
- It is time that the medical and teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life.
Aldous Huxley
- Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
Buckminster Fuller
- Education by choice, with its marvelous motivating psychology of desire for truth and the exercise of this desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic.
- Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and misconditioning of humanity. I’ve found the educations [sic] systems are full of it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
- We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
Buddha
- Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
Paul Rosenberg
[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]
For all you highly educated , utra sophisticated intellectuals on the Burning Platform. This article explains why we are in a jam.
The occidental observer website…… A review of : Why the Germans , Why the Jews Part 1+2 …..posted on the 19th and 20th.
Pay close attention to what the Jews says about how they control America culture , the methods they use to sabotage American society especially the contempt they have for White People and white European culture. Then tell me they are not our enemies.
Consider the amount of time and money we spend on education.
What’s the ROI? From my perspective (being 66 years old), the American public seems to be more and more willfully ignorant. Their main focus is entertainment and sports. I haven’t seen any sort of huge celebration about intellectual issues, they way they had the legalization in Colorado.
Notice since Einstein’s time – we really haven’t had any breakthrough’s in physics – except to keep conducting the basic same experiment – build larger and larger particle accelerators in hopes of a collision.
Think of the billions of dollars, and billions of person hours wasted, learning crap from government schools and corporate textbooks. As well as all those useless ‘survey’ courses you needed to take in college – the guise was ‘to make you a well rounded person’, when in reality it was to fund some department that needed the money.
I don’t think it’s antisemitic to call the Jewish elites our enemies . In many ways they are no different than the Jewish Bolsheviks murderers that took over Russia. Remember many of the leading Bolsheviks were from New York city.
I’m waiting for a genius to offer a creative system to educate large masses of people.
Having said that, the lies and omissions the system has promulgated through the public schools have worked its purposes beyond wildest expectations. Mission accomplished.
On the other hand, any fool can see it’s really the fault of the teachers.
@Gayle: “I’m waiting for a genius to offer a creative system to educate large masses of people.”
Well the government K-12 is mostly a baby sitting service, with everyone segregated by age rather than ability. It’s my opinion the kids could go to school 4 hrs a day, and school could end at the end of 9th or 10th grade, and could go for tech training, or go to a community college.
Greetings,
The school serves no other purpose than indoctrination and obedience to the State. The rage and humiliation I feel each and every time I have to go through a TSA checkpoint is the rage and humiliation that our youth experience each and every day. This atmosphere guarantees than any love for learning is flogged out of the child.
Our only saving grace is that parasites that work for the State are required to undergo this worthless education. Those that avoid the system outright will become an unstoppable force as the State will one day wake up and find out it no longer has any idea as to what is going on, how anything works or any means by which to control the people.
At this point in time, a public education is almost a guarantee that you will not survive what is coming next.
Dutchman
Good ideas. Short day would run into problem of working parents not home until 5:00 or 6:00 o’clock so schools would have to expand the after school daycare service they already offer (on your dollar).
Should the world hold together, maybe every kid will sit with his custom teacher – a computer – loaded with a custom curriculum. Then the needs of even the geniuses can be met and a lot of teachers could be let go.
“I’m waiting for a genius to offer a creative system to educate large masses of people.”
I’m using it right now – the internet. Read it, think critically, figure out what is right, wrong, important, irrelevant, and perhaps most of all, literally false but nonetheless illuminating.
Before the internet, there were libraries.
I have over 20 years of formal education, but most of what I truly know is self-taught.
Do you want to be right, or do you want to be smart? The vast majority are incapable of rational thought. They rarely remember anything more than a couple of months prior. They can’t form concepts from percepts because they are not interested; all they want are entertainments, lots of booze, sex, drugs, and so forth.
For proof, just look at how profitable it is to cater to their ‘needs’.
The tiny minority that moves the world had to remain hidden for fear of their lives (such as the Church burning people at the stake). It was only with the advent of the USA that these people could function out in the open.
That’s ending now because of universal suffrage. Giving the vote to the same majority as described in the first paragraph….very stupid indeed.
Snick is right. Think about how much smarter he’s going to get if he keeps reading my posts. The internet is game changing, in the hands of the intelligent. Twenty years ago, if I needed to research a particular alloy, it meant searching through some very dense books, and talking to people familiar with that stuff, usually sales people. And never really being satisfied with the answers. Now, in under an hour, I can not only find exactly what I need to know, but source it and price it.
@starlicker: indeed. Reading your posts is like a refresher quiz on logical fallacies. Very much obliged!
🙂
BB – Einstein, Abraham Mazlow & Boris Sidis were all Jews. Not a bad showing for the above short list.
I dream of a time when all children go to private schools and the money wasted on public education is used to buy bombers…….
I actually had this bumper sticker when my kid was in grade school.
Montessori
The Montessori Method of education, developed by Dr. Maria Montessori, is a child-centered educational approach based on scientific observations of children from birth to adulthood. Dr. Montessori’s Method has been time tested, with over 100 years of success in diverse cultures throughout the world.
It is a view of the child as one who is naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a supportive, thoughtfully prepared learning environment. It is an approach that values the human spirit and the development of the whole child—physical, social, emotional, cognitive.
continued….. Components necessary for a program to be considered authentically Montessori include multiage groupings that foster peer learning, uninterrupted blocks of work time, and guided choice of work activity. In addition, a full complement of specially designed Montessori learning materials are meticulously arranged and available for use in an aesthetically pleasing environment.
The teacher, child, and environment create a learning triangle. The classroom is prepared by the teacher to encourage independence, freedom within limits, and a sense of order. The child, through individual choice, makes use of what the environment offers to develop himself, interacting with the teacher when support and/or guidance is needed
I’d been eating nothing but junk lately so today I needed something healthier. I went to Burger King. I was assisted by a woman at the counter (she was actually white) who was very nice but extremely dim-witted. I thought to myself that if only she could get “free” college tuition paid by taxpayers (as Sanders wants) then she wouldn’t be retarded anymore. Damn this country.
I think what those “genii” are saying is that “rote training” is good if you want the populous to reiterate a false truth, that is the method.
I know of a few with photographic memory who can restate what they read with great accuracy. Thats memory. And they repeated what they memorized.
Intelligence is someone that dismisses rote thought.
But when things fell outside the manual
But when things fell outside the manual they failed horrifically. It wasnt written. Instead of working for a solution they just seized up.
Management material.
Dutchman says: Consider the amount of time and money we spend on education. What’s the ROI?
Billy says the untermenschen from Latin America are born rapists and murderers. I propose they are uneducated oafs and nothing less.
The return on investment is that we are not worse off. If it weren’t for universal free education, we’d be even more fucked up, if you can stand to think on it, picture a nation full of hillbillies.
“Iska Waran says: I’d been eating nothing but junk lately so today I needed something healthier. I went to Burger King”
WOW!!!