John Lancaster Spalding - Education Quotes

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The lover of education labors first of all to educate himself.

John Lancaster Spalding
Moral education is the development of individuality, and individuality can not be developed by formulas and mechanical processes: it is the work of the master who brings to his task a genuine and loving interest in the individual.

John Lancaster Spalding
To think of education as a means of preserving institutions however excellent, is to have a superficial notion of its end and purpose, which is to mould and fashion men who are more than institutions, who create, outgrow, and re-create them.

John Lancaster Spalding
Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.

John Lancaster Spalding
In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed.

John Lancaster Spalding
The aim of education is to strengthen and multiply the powers and activities of the mind rather than to increase its possessions.

John Lancaster Spalding
Where it is the chief aim to teach many things, little education is given or received.

John Lancaster Spalding
A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

John Lancaster Spalding
A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.

John Lancaster Spalding
More inspiring and interesting teaching alone can make progress in education possible: for such teaching alone has power to produce greater self-activity, greater concentration of mind, greater desire to learn not only how to get a living, but how to live.

John Lancaster Spalding
As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them.

John Lancaster Spalding
Conversation injures more than it benefits. Men talk to escape from themselves, from sheer dread of silence. Reflection makes them uncomfortable, and they find distraction in a noise of words. They seek not the company of those who might enlighten and improve them, but that of whoever can divert and amuse them. Thus the intercourse which ought to be a chief means of education, is for the most part, the occasion of mental and moral enfeeblement.

John Lancaster Spalding