Quotation Saturday: Education
Mamacita says: I’ve been writing exams for the college for the past two weeks, and my eyeballs are falling out of the sockets and spinning like a cartoon character’s. The only thing missing is the googly eye-spinning soundtrack, for which there are no words.
1. Education is one of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get. –William Lowe Bryan
2. When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, ‘As much as the living are to the dead.” –Diogenes Laertius
3. Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. –Leonardo da Vinci
4. The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action. –Herbert Spencer
5. The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s time. –Sydney J. Harris
6. Learning makes a man fit company for himself. –Anonymous 
7. Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer. –C.C. Colton
8. Education: Being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don’t. It’s knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it’s knowing how to use the information once you get it. –William Feather
9. Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. –Robert Frost
10. In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards. –Mark Twain
11. Only the curious will learn and only the resolute will overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient. –Edmund S. Wilson
12. Education is too important to be left soley to educators. –Francis Keppel
13. He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins. –William Ellergy Channing
14. A wise man is one who finally realizes that there are some questions one can ask which may have no answers. –Anonymous
15. Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish. –John Ray
16. Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. –Ambrose Bierce
17. There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get off the thing that he was educated in. –Will Rogers
18. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. –Henry Brooks Adams
19. You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself. –Galileo Galileo
20. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. –Oscar Wilde
21. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. –Mark Twain
22. The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead. –George Saville, Marquis of Halifax
23. I am inclined to think that one’s education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots. -Hesketh Pearson
24. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. –Mark Twain
25. A fool’s brain digests philosophy into foly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. 
Hence University education. –George Bernard Shaw
26. The only thing experience teaches us is that experience teaches us nothing. –Andre Maurois
27. He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on. –Benjamin Franklin
28. Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned, and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly. –Thomas Henry Huxley
29. Courses in education given at. . . teachers’ colleges have traditionally been used as a substitute for genuine scholarship. In my opinion, much of the so-called science of “education” was invented as a necessary mechanism for enabling semieducated people to act as tolerable teachers. –Sloan Wilson
30. The result of the educative process is capacity for further education. –John Dewey
31. The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
32. Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. –Robert G. Ingersoll
33. I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. –Wilson Mizner
34. The only real education is what goes counter to you. –Andre Gide
35. No man who worships education has got the best out of education. Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete. –G.K. Chesterton
36. The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done. –Jean Piaget
37. True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius. –Felix E. Schelling
38. I’m sure the reason such young nitwits are produced in our schools is because they have no contact with anything of any use in everyday life. –Petronius
39. Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing – the rest is mere sheep-herding. –Ezra Loomis Pound
40. Teachers are people who start things they never see finished, and for which they never get thanks until it is too late. –Max Forman
41. Sojme men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu. –William Howard Taft
42. The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. –Elbert Hubbard
43. It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely
strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. . . I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not. –Albert Einstein
44. Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. –Bertrand Russell
45. Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. –John Ruskin
46. We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. –Ralph Waldo Emerson.
47. Education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. –G.M. Trevelyan
48. Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little as he can for his money. –Max Forman
49. Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever. –John Mason Brown
50. If the lesson makes it to the dining room table that night, the lesson was a success. –Steve Spangler
I love children, and I love students of all ages, and I love teaching, and I love genuine education in all of its 6-degrees-of-separation wonder. Perhaps knowing these things about me will soften what I am about to say next, which is simply this:
It’s no surprise to me that a student doesn’t much like to sit still and pay attention when the instructor is boring, lackluster, and uninformed. Excellent lessons require much more than books, paper, and pencils. However, I sill maintain that the majority of responsibility for learning lies with the student, not the teacher. A person who desires to learn will learn in spite of all of the obstacles our modern educational system puts in his/her path, and believe me, modern educational systems put all the obstacles in the path of our students that they possibly can.
It’s still – mostly – the student’s responsiblity.
Bring it on.
Heat Advisory? I Don't Care.
Mamacita says: We’re having the first “heat advisory” of the summer, but I’m sitting at my dining room table, tapping away on my laptop, looking out the window at the huge shagbark hickory tree in my front yard – complete with scampering squirrels – and I’m not hot at all.
That last statement may be interpreted as you wish. Sadly, THAT interpretation is true these days. Sigh.
But the other reason I’m not hot is because I’m eating popsicles. Sugar-free popsicles, so they don’t even COUNT, right?
The grape ones are best. The orange ones are in second place, and as for the cherry popsicles. . . .if I wanted to suck on frozen cough syrup, I’d just throw some DayQuil in the freezer. Cherry popsicles are too reminiscent of medicine.
I suppose an obsession for summertime popsicles is childish, but those of you who have met me know that I’m actually perfect in every possible way except for my use of popsicles as a cooling device I AM childish.
Come on over. I’ll even share my popsicles with you. You can have ALL the red ones!
Tap, tap, tapping away at my laptop, creating exams for the college, tap, tap, tap, sucking and licking away like a porn star gone insane.
Grab it, Google.
It Is A Terrible Thing Not To Become A Woman When One Ceases To Be A Girl
Mamacita says: This was formerly posted back in February of 2009, but since so many people are blogging about their pregnancies and deliveries these days, I thought I’d rerun this one of mine. I have others, but I kind of like this one best.
First of all, I enjoyed being pregnant. Heck, I LOVED it! When else can a woman just sit and read, and know she’s accomplishing something wonderful at the same time? I felt wonderful, pregnant. I felt exhilarated, when I wasn’t tired, and I felt justified in EATING, and I didn’t have to constantly suck in my gut – because my gut was not merely a gut; it was a PERSON – I got gusts and boost of incredible energy during which I would clean and dust and wash and tidy until the cows came home. I was even happier during my second pregnancy, because I knew for a fact by then that all the little twinges, etc, were completely natural and only to be expected, and I feared nothing. NOTHING. I didn’t read a single pregnancy book during my second pregnancy; not because I felt there was nothing more to be learned, but more because I felt that a lot of what is in such books is there to frighten naive women into buying unnecessary things, or to frighten women, period, when there is really nothing to be frighted OF. None of these opinions apply, mind you, to women who are having genuinely serious problem pregnancies.
Bear in mind, also, that it’s been a long time since I’ve been pregnant, and while the many means of GETTING pregnant have not changed (smirk), the options for delivery have become many, and I can’t help but think that some of them are downright silly. Not as silly as many of the restrictions and rules that used to apply, but still, well, silly. I mean, for my first delivery, I wasn’t even allowed to get up and use the bathroom! I made damn sure it was written down in red ink in my records, for my second. It would be a mighty stupid woman who would give birth in a toilet and not realize it, although I also realize that the world is full of women who are, yes, just that stupid. I, however, was NOT one of THEM, and I wanted to use the toilet when I wanted to use the toilet, and that second time, I wandered all over the place in the few tiny little minutes allotted to that particular delivery.
<–That’s my son. He’s 27 years old, but whenever I think of him, this is one of the images my mind instantly focuses on. He was born with a full head of bright red hair; his hair was so bright, I could hear people in the hospital nursery hallway commenting about it. “Didja see that one kid with the red hair?” “Will you look at the redhead over there?” I lay in my bed and smiled. Not only had I seen the redheaded baby, I was going to take him home with me and keep him forever.
I’d had Zappa in only twenty minutes; I woke up in labor, my water broke as I walked the few feet to the bathroom, and we were in the car and bookin’ to town. We almost got stopped by a train, but a little push on the gas pedal took care of that. We pulled up in front of my mother’s house, threw Belle out the window into Mom’s waiting arms, and dashed off to the hospital. Hub dropped me off at the emergency room door and I had the baby while my husband was parking the car. When he came running back inside, he found me and the doctor standing in the hallway admiring the baby through the window. Total time: 20 minutes. I highly recommend this method.
This was before the days when new mothers had got to spend every waking moment with their new baby. Sometimes I think it was better that way; it was like having training wheels for a day or two before we were expected to ride that new adult-sized bike all by ourselves, with the occasional “Look Ma, no hands” stints that we all love so much as parents. Our babies were brought to us every couple of hours, and were then taken back to the nursery so we could get some genuine rest. Did we “bond?” Of course we did. We just didn’t need to “bond” in front of everybody, and a woman would have to be nuts not to take advantage of the naptime. OUR naptime, that is. Once we had the baby home, we weren’t going to be doing much of ANY kind of sleeping for a long, long, long, long, long time. As in. . . YEARS.
Having babies isn’t what I’d call a “comfy, pain-free hobby,” but it’s also not the horror a lot of older women paint it to be, and usually in front of a young pregnant woman. (Why do they DO THAT? How insensitive!) I had no trouble spittin’ them out – did I mention the 20 minutes? – and while I know most women aren’t that lucky, I do wonder at the low tolerance for pain some people demonstrate in public.
My hospital roommate for Zappa’s birth was a woman I still refer to as “The Big Sissy.” She wept and screamed and required the company of her husband, her mother, her sisters, her bestest friends, and countless numbers of churchy acquaintances throughout her entire labor. This meant, back then, that while SHE had company, I couldn’t. Them was da rules. And when they finally did take her away to another room to have her baby – thank Heaven – she practically had a camera crew in there with her to record her every scream, groan, spasm, fart, poop, and vaginal tear for all posterity. After her baby finally came, she then needed her husband to stay with her every second to COMFORT her and be WITH her, and her mother to remind her that she’d been through a terrible experience and needed rest and a lot of babying herself, which meant I couldn’t have MY baby in the room with me.
I hated that Big Sissy then and I hate her now, 27 years later.
I made do, though. I spent most of my time in the hallway looking at his beauty: my son, the redheaded one in the corner crib, the pretty one, the baby who made all the other newborns look like either Winston Churchill or the wrong end of a cow.
The Big Sissy’s baby, for example, looked like the love child of Mr. Potato Head and Linda Tripp. In fact, The Big Sissy looked a lot like Linda Tripp. I hated her. I also hated her horrible mother and her ugly husband and the parade of dowdy women who were kneeling all over the floor giving God advice about how He should look after The Big Sissy and her baby. Wahh wahh wahh, pray pray, sob sob, boo hoo, oh, craponthemall.
Where was their consideration for The Big Sissy’s roommate? There wasn’t any. Women such as these color my perception of Christians still today. (I AM one; I’m just not like these pathetic specimens.) (I hope I die before I become like them.) (I suppose it’s not nice to judge them, but I do it mostly from the joy it gives me.) (It’s kind of like pointing to hardened criminals on the post office wall and being glad you’re not there, and knowing full well you never will be.)
Hub could not get off work to take us home from the hospital; this did NOT make me cry nor did it traumatize either of us in any way. Stuff happens, and we deal with it. Sheesh.
My mother picked us up and even stopped at the grocery store on the way home so I could run in and buy some things. People in the store looked at my hospital bracelet and my only slightly flatter stomach and almost backed away in horror. Why was I OUT? I should be in BED! RESTING! I felt like some kind of freak for being fine and hearty.
I shrugged and went home to my two-children family: 
we felt so lucky! So blessed! That is because, we were. (Check out the patches on the sofa! Those were to keep the snakes from popping up through the worn places.)
With Belle, two years earlier, I’d been so afraid of this pain I’d heard about from so many “helpful” women and read about in so many “helpful” books that I agreed to a spinal; this, of course, since I have never been a person who took orders well, knocked me flat on my back for about a week, which meant that other people gave my baby her first bath, her first burpie, her first. . . well, lots of things. I listened too much and I read too much and I believed everything and everyone, and when the advice was contradictory, I sometimes did BOTH. I was afraid of everything. Most of all, I was afraid of myself; what if I, in my ignorance, somehow did something wrong and the baby would cry? Or. . . die? Seriously, I was that stupid. Her labor only lasted just under five hours, but in five hours, a naive young thing can fall for a lot of hooey. Tomorrow is Belle’s birthday, in 
fact. Happy Birthday, my Princess. Look, everyone, at how beautiful she is! How beautiful she’s always been!
The second time, I was smarter. Also, there wasn’t time for anything anyway, so I just had the baby and made fun of The Big Sissy and dealt with life as it came my way. It was a far superior way than the first.
So, what’s the moral of this story? Do I have to have one? I’ll drag a few in by the hind legs and say that it might be “Embrace life – don’t hide from it. FEEL things. Laugh at yourself and others; to hell with self esteem. Pity the Big Sissies, but don’t make excuses for them, and for God’s sake don’t be one of them. Be aware of people and don’t let any whiny selfishness intrude upon the rights of someone else. Be an adult. Buck up and show some spunk. Don’t let others make an invalid of you. Get up. Let others watch the baby once in a while so you can get some sleep. Motherhood is full of pain; get used to it and don’t whine and cry your way through it. Motherhood is full of joy; focus on that part. And did I mention “grow up?”
It is a terrible thing not to become a woman when one ceases to be a girl.
Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly
