by Curt Kovener
Area students are back in the classroom and, like Garrison Keillor’s youngsters of Lake Wobegon, we all want our “children to be above average.” And it is that goal why we send them back to school to learn. (Don’t you wish we could do the same with some adults and elected officials?)
Why is education important? Here are the thoughts of others…
• At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living. Neil Postman
• Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best. Bob Talbert
• The responsibility for producing an educated citizenry is too important to be left entirely to educators. Education is everybody’s business. Thomas J. Brown
•The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer. Alice W. Rollins
•They say what you don’t know won’t hurt you—and some of us haven’t felt a twinge of pain in years. Fletcher Knebel
• The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions. James Russell Lowell
• Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre. Gail Godwin
• Children have a lot more worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read. E.L. Doctorow
•Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. Edward Everett
• Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. John W. Gardner
•It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is to be educated. Edith Hamilton