24 Inspiring Quotes on Learning to Change Your Mindset

1. “The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.” ~John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling
2. "Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity." ~ Nancy Astor
3. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that, in their ability to think, children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers.” ~ John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
4. "Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. " ~Kofi Annan
5. “As society rapidly changes, individuals will have to be able to function comfortably in a world that is always in flux. Knowledge will continue to increase at a dizzying rate. This means that a content-based curriculum, with a set body of information to be imparted to students, is entirely inappropriate as a means of preparing children for their adult roles.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
6. "I've never let my school interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
7. “School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
8. "Great education means self-education, but as some point it must also mean having a great mentor. In the history of the world, the combination of classics and mentors has been the method of obtaining all of the necessary knowledge, traits and skills." ~Oliver Demille
9. "A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is." ~ Lao-Tzu
10. “All problems in life-whether they are international life, in the collective life of a nation, or in the life of an individual-are the problems of education. And the problems of education are the problems of knowledge.” ~ Maharishi
11. "Food is a perfect microcosm of learning. Anyone who does not eat well has failed in his or her own ability to systematically learn. Learning is impossible without being fed. The act of growing according to one’s genetic blueprint supersedes the act of learning. Students who are adding inches to their height are biologically different from people who are not, and the same eating schedule will not accommodate other. Every stated goal of an educational institution (or real goal of a parent) is predicated on a student’s lifelong health, which requires good food as a foundation." ~ Clark Aldrich

These final 13 quotes come from J. Krishnamurti's brilliant essay, Education and the Significance of Life:

1. Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult.
2. Reaction only breeds opposition, and reform needs further reform.
3. It is only when we face experience as it comes and do not avoid disturbance that we keep intelligence highly awakened; and intelligence highly awakened is intuition, which is the only true guide in life.
4. As long as education does not cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little significance.
5. All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security, and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.
6. Education is not merely a matter of training the mind.
7. If education leads to war, if it teaches us to destroy or be destroyed, has it not utterly failed?
8. To bring about right education, we must obviously understand the meaning of life as a whole, and for that we have to be able to think, not consistently but directly and truly.
9. To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.
10. The function of education is to create human beings who are integrated and, therefore, intelligent.
11. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity in oneself and in others, is education.
12. What is the good of learning if in the process we are destroying ourselves?
13. The individual is of first importance, not the system.