I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling.
And when it comes to developing the high standards we need, it's time to stop working against our teachers and start working with them. Teachers don't go in to education to get rich. They don't go in to education because they don't believe in their children. They want their children to succeed, but we've got to give them the tools. Invest in early childhood education. Invest in our teachers and our children will succeed.
The sole function of education...[is] to open the way to thinking and knowing, and the school, as the outstanding organ for the people's education, must serve that end exclusively.
In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject.
The same things are best both for individuals and for states, and these are the things which the legislator ought to implant in the minds of his citizens.