Alfred North Whitehead - Education Quotes

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Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.

Alfred North Whitehead
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead
There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations

Alfred North Whitehead
From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

Alfred North Whitehead
In a general way the whole period of education is dominated by this threefold rhythm. Till the age of thirteen or fourteen there is the romantic stage, from fourteen to eighteen the stage of precision, and from eighteen to two and twenty the stage of generalization.

Alfred North Whitehead
For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

Alfred North Whitehead
The essence of education is that it be religious. Pray, what is religious education? A religious education is an education which inculcates duty and reverence. Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events. Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice. And the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

Alfred North Whitehead
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful—Corruptio optimi, pessima [the corruption of the best is the worst].

Alfred North Whitehead
In the garden of Eden God saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system [of education] children named the animals before they saw them.

Alfred North Whitehead
In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place.

Alfred North Whitehead
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical.

Alfred North Whitehead
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

Alfred North Whitehead