“The school had some good teachers, mostly older women who didn’t care if they were laughed at for reciting poetry, or for letting a tear fall while they described the Battle of Verdun.”

Tobias Wolff

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“We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said, ‘I don’t know that one.’ And he mentioned another. I said, ‘I don’t know that one either, Dad,’ and he became very alarmed that I didn’t know what he considered my own musical genealogy…So he spent the rest of the afternoon making a list for me, and at the end of the day, he said this is your education. And across the top of the page, he wrote, ‘100 essential country songs.'”

Rosanne Cash

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“The great thing about writing a book is that it brings you into contact with people whose opinions you should have canvassed before you ever pressed pen to paper. They write to you. They telephone you. They come to your bookstore events and give you things to read that you should have read already. It’s this dialectical process that makes me glad I chose the profession I did: a free education that goes on for a lifetime.”

Christopher Hitchens

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“The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence—the ‘smart’ compliment—is that is misrepresents the neural reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activity, which is learning from mistakes. Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.”

Jonah Lehrer

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“In fact, to every young person listening tonight who’s contemplating their career choice: If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child—become a teacher. Your country needs you.”

President Barack Obama

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“Learning doesn’t happen behind walls.”

Qasim Davis

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“No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that Huckleberry Finn is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace ‘nigger’ with alternative terms like ‘slave’ (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from ‘nigger,’ so that substitution just mucks up the prose—its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college—or even graduate school—where it can be put in proper context.”

Lorrie Moore

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“We attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week, in summer, walking to it in the cool of the mornings by the forest paths, and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. All the pupils brought their dinners in baskets—corn dodger, buttermilk and other good things—and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. It is the part of my education which I look back upon with the most satisfaction.”

Mark Twain

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“Amazingly, America—the birthplace of the Internet—is the only developed nation that does not teach programming in its public schools.”

Douglas Rushkoff

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“History requires a world of time and bitter hard work when your ‘education’ is no further advanced than the cat’s; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a farthing’s value for your waste of time.”

Mark Twain

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“The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students…It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.”

David Brooks

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