Tao Te Ching
Education
With the Industrial Revolution, our educational systems naturally shifted focus and priority to training people to live and prosper in a new, industrial age of materialism, to learn jobs in non-thinking, robot-like occupations and lifestyles. As technology, automation, and actual robots developed, the value and number of these jobs decreased as information technology opportunities rapidly expanded. But educational systems in the common “rear-view mirrorism” style waited too long to realize and react to this cataclysmic shift. The much greater shift going on now caused by smart phones, tablets, social media, and fast online access to almost all of the world’s knowledge has quickly made most educational programs designed for job creation obsolete. The challenge for education now has perhaps increased many times more than any previous time in history.
Quotes (172)
“Water reaches its goal by flowing continuously. It fills up every depression before it flows on… So likewise in teaching others everything depends on consistency, for it is only through repetition that the pupil makes the material his own.”
“A man may fail in his education to penetrate to the real roots of humanity and remain fixed in convention. A partial education of this sort is as bad as none.”
“A man who halts at the beginning, so long as he has not yet abandoned truth, finds the right way… the beginning is the time of few mistakes… not yet influenced by obscuring interests and desires, one sees things intuitively as they really are.”
“The wise… teach without saying anything… create without claiming… work without taking credit… accomplish without attachment.”
“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.”
“No trace of slavery ought to mix with studies… No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.”
“If you consider what are called the virtues in mankind, you will find their growth is assisted by education and cultivation.”
“I would teach children music,physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning.”
“Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead.”
“If filial piety and fraternal respect are made important principles of instruction in village schools, graying haired elders will no longer be on the roads carrying heavy loads on their backs and heads... Treat with the reverence due to old age the elders in your own family, so that the elders in the families of others shall be similarly treated.”
“Learning proceeds until death and only then does it stop. ... Its purpose cannot be given up for even a moment. To pursue it is to be human, to give it up to be a beast.”
“In ancient times, when sage kings ruled, their government and education were egalitarian, and their charity extended to all. Those above and those below were of like mind.”
“The wise learn with reason, those of less understanding with experience, the most ignorant by necessity, and beasts by nature.”
“Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.”
“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”
“Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught, He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.”
“Education and study confer no greater benefit than learn to avoid the wildness of extremes.”
“the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth”
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
38. Fruit Over Flowers
65. Simplicity: the Hidden Power of Goodness
“The sage institutes education as a way to enable people to transform themselves, arrive at the Middle Way, and rest there.”
“All those who would communicate the message of the source must be able to kill a person's false personality without blinking an eye”
“She stretched them by the shoulders, pulled them by their necks up to the heights of other men. She did these things because she was a mother with a heart as bright as the sun and as wide as a lake.”
“I don't want learning, or dignity, or respectability. I want this music, and this dawn, and the warmth of your cheek against mine”
“The sage seeks without seeking and studies without studying. For the truth of all things lies not in acting but in doing what is natural. By not acting, the sage shares in the naturalness of all things.”
“It is Being itself that becomes the real teacher as we learn by encountering ourselves in and through others.”
“Learning is not merely the memorizing of isolated facts but rather a perennial search for values relevant to existence.”
“Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.”
“It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.”
“I have never found any who prayed so well as those who had never been taught how”
“When you are young your mind is sharp and penetrating—after you grow up the thoughts scatter and gallop away [...] things you studied as a child are the light of the rising sun; the studies in your maturity a candle.”
“'Tis education forms the common mind,
Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.”
“Teach your child to hold his tongue, he’ll learn fast enough to speak.”
“He among us who best knows how to bear the good and evil fortunes of this life is, in my opinion, the best educated.”
“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.”
“Paths of learning are necessarily divergent, they reflect the diversity of mankind.”
“I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
“Well, knowledge is a fine thing, and mother Eve thought so; but she smarted so severely for hers, that most of her daughters have been afraid of it since.”
“All education is despotism… Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down… teachers, politics and modes of government poison our minds before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. They deprive us of our vitality”
“Educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”
“Teachings... are given only for the purpose of realizing the nature of mind. Beyond this, the victorious ones don't teach anything.”
“On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.”
“You can only know what you have thought about and thinking has to be kindled like a fire. Reading can spark this kind of thinking when it forcibly imposes ideas on the mind foreign to it’s mood, beliefs, and prejudices.”
“Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.”
“In every French village there is now a lighted torch, the schoolmaster; and a mouth trying to blow it out, the priest.”
“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures.”
“Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave... [It] is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.”
“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”
“It astonished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in order to render their children as nearly useless as possible... deliberately swindled in some of the most important branches of human inquiry, directed into false channels or left to drift”
“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
“To imagine a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies and require the youths to give intelligent answers to the question that arise is reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the actual conduct of their affairs in after life... to teach a boy merely the nature of the things which exist in the word around him would be giving him but a narrow and shallow conception of the universe”
“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”
“There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate... Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive”
“An education isn’t how much you know… It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.”
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
“Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.”
“The great aim of our education is to bring out of the child every faculty that he brings with him, and then to try to win that child to turn all his abilities, his powers, his capacities, to the helping and serving of the community which he is a part.”
“He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”
“Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.”
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
“Education has to steer its way between the Scylla of giving the instincts free play and the Charybdis of frustrating them... bringing up children is playing a game with them.”
“Honest education is dangerous to tyranny and privilege: systems like the capitalist one use both ignorance and education as underpinnings for general faith in themselves as rulers.”
“The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.”
“What is ‘education and enlightenment‘ if their dead-sea-fruit is a caitiff race, with rottenness in its bones?”
“The thing needful is improvement of education, not simply by turning out teachers who can do better the things that are not necessary to do, but rather by changing the conception of what constitutes education.”
“That man is best educated who can do the greatest number of things to help and heal the world.”
“It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is to be educated.”
“education… will always have an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.”
“The instinctive part of our character is very malleable. It may be changed by beliefs, by material circumstances, by social circumstances, and by institutions... [education can] promote all that is creative, and so diminish the impulses and desires that center around possession [with] the growth of one individual or one community as little as possible at the expense of another.”
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
“My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.”
“It is the natural instinct of a child to work from within outwards; 'First I think, and then I draw my think.' What wasted efforts we make to teach the child to stop thinking, and only to observe!”
“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”
“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen.”
“The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational systems suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.”
“The unification of the teacher and disciple affirms the essence of all aspects of evolution.”
“I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”
“Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.”
“To my father's ferocious pedagogy I owe the endurance and obstinacy which have always stood by me in times of difficulty. To this ferocity I also owe all the indomitable thoughts which govern me now at the end of my life and which do not condescend to accept comforting from either God or the devil.”
“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”
“I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.”
“Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia... There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character.”
“As education spreads, theologies lose credence, and receive an external conformity without influence upon conduct or hope”
“Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts... nor merely the preparation of the individual to earn his keep... but as the transmission of our [world's] mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage”
“Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.”
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
“Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.”
“If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified.”
“Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.”
“Racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.”
“We as an economic society are going to have to pay our whole population to go to school and pay it to stay at school.”
“The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time.”
“There is no end to education…the whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”
“You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?”
“True teaching can be on an individual basis only. The same medicine cannot be prescribed for all.”
“The object of the educational system, taken as a whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens”
“The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is that the difference between the ‘uneducated’ and the ‘educated’ is so slight.”
“Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.”
“his parents kept him out of school… Going to a white school and walking a medicine man’s road, you can’t do both.”
“We shouldn’t see some as sharp and others as dull. By treating all children without discrimination, we enable them to see all beings as equal.”
“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.”
“The purpose of education should be to lead people out of the dark wood of meaninglessness, purposelessness, drift, and indulgence, up a mountain where there can be gained the truth that makes you free.”
“The real task of education is not education for work, but education for leisure... education for the sake of leading us out of the dark wood of egoentricity, pettiness, and worldly ignorance”
“the goal of a college should be to create people who are not lost, to create sages—people without doubts or illusions... But colleges today are different... the more one studies, the less one comes to know the world at large... They don't understand what it means to understand”
“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality.”
“I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth... I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?”
“One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution… more loss of religious faith can be traced to the theory of evolution than to anything else.”
“We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.”
“It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”
“We destroy the love of learning… by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards… A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
“School is an advertising agency that makes you believe that you need society as it is... Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting... yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.”
“Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves… because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
“Education takes everything and pulls it apart and makes no connections at all. Permaculture makes the connections... it's the opposite of what we're taught in school.”
“Imitation is a real evil that has to be broken before real teaching can begin… Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade… in college, you are supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating”
“A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, ‘If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.’ He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.”
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”
“Giving kids clothes and food is one thing, but it's much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.”
“When I go to give a talk somewhere, I never know what I am going to say…. The purpose is not to teach them anything. It is to awaken them to their own inner reality.” “I don’t consider myself a teacher… I only try to show people how to turn on their light”
“In the West these days, though they have good intentions, parents’ main advice to children is 'You must be strong. You must have self-esteem. You must not lose your hold on yourself. You must stand on your own feet. Don’t depend on others.' —but what is self? Modern people are afraid of losing their own ordinary egos. What else do they have to lose but that?”
“If we think of ‘teaching’ as imparting knowledge, knowledge and skill-sets are necessary but teaching stays on the level of only understanding the words. If by ‘teaching’ we mean, transmitting the true sense of the words, words aren’t even necessary. Realized wisdom communicates with every gesture and expression.”
“Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.”
“these twelve experiences that Naropa went through were a continuous unlearning process. To begin with, he had to unlearn, to undo the cultural façade. Then he had to undo the philosophical and emotional façade. Then he had to step out and become free altogether.”
“I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.”
“And all of the colors are black... It's just imagination they lack. Everything's the same back in my little town.
”
“I no have education. I have inspiration. If I was educated, I would be a damn fool.”
“To learn how to learn, you have to love learning—or you have to at least enjoy it—because so much learning is about being motivated to teach yourself.”
“Two centuries ago, 12% of the world could read and write; today 85% can. Literacy and education will soon be universal, for girls as well as for boys.”
“There is no boy, at this age, cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting an education. If I had worried about who liked me and who thought I was cute when I was your age, I wouldn’t be married to the President of the United States.”
“Education is a counterforce to corporate greed... Our MBA programs must teach philosophy as well as economics, statistics, or how so-and-so won this year's award for marketing. They need to address critical global issues.”
“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped.”
“This danger is not new, but it is always magnified during those times when a population is empowered at a faster rate than it is educated... The elite guardians of wisdom will be rendered useless if the masses are incapable of understanding their language, unable to appreciate their concerns, or uninterested even in considering their advice.”
“We should learn everything and then choose which path to follow. Education is neither Eastern nor Western, it is human.”
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