Quotes on Education
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49. Education; Learning
We talked of the education of children; and I asked him what he thought was best to teach them first. Johnson: "Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the mean time your breech is bare.  Sir, while you are considering which of the two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learnt them both."
Boswell: Life
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63. Education; Learning; Reading
"People have now-a-days got a strange opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much as reading the books from which the lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chemistry by lectures:-- You might teach the making of shoes by lectures!"
Boswell: Life
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900. Education; Learning
"There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end, they lose at the other."
Boswell: Life of Johnson
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1,146. Education; Youth
"To learn is the proper business of youth; and whether we increase our knowledge by books or by conversation, we are equally indebted to foreign assistance."
Johnson: Rambler #121 (May 14, 1751)
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1,147. Education; Humanity
"The greater part of students are not born with abilities to construct systems, or advance knowledge; nor can have any hope beyond that of becoming intelligent hearers in the schools of art, of being able to comprehend what others discover, and to remember what others teach. Even those to whom Providence hath allotted greater strength of understanding can expect only to improve a single science. In every other part of learning they must be content to follow opinions which they are not able to examine; and, even in that which they claim as peculiarly their own, can seldom add more than some small particle of knowledge to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times, the collective labour of a thousand intellects."
Johnson: Rambler #121 (May 14, 1751)
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1,261. Education;Progress
"Whatever or abilities or application, we must submit to learn from others what perhaps would have lain hid for ever from human penetration, had not some remote inquiry brought it to view; as treasures are thrown up by the ploughman and the digger in the rude exercise of their common occupations."
Johnson: Rambler #154 (September 7, 1751)
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1,262. Education; Progress
"The man whose genius qualifies him for great undertakings must at least be content to learn from books the present state of human knowledge; that he may not ascribe to himself the invention of arts generally known; weary his attention with experiments of which the event has been long registered; and waste in attempts, which have already succeeded or miscarried, that time which might have been spent with usefulness and honour upon new undertakings."
Johnson: Rambler #154 (September 7, 1751)
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