As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn’t have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Studies have identified a significant ‚skills gap‘ between what students are currently being taught and the skills employers are seeking in today’s global economy. Our children must be better prepared than they are now to meet the future challenges of our ever-changing world.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

Frivolity is inborn, conceit acquired by education.

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

I went to a lovely school, and I got an incredible education. And I actually think that my education is what really sets me apart, ‚cause I’m very smart.

So long as I’m Commander-in-Chief, we will sustain the strongest military the world has ever known. When you take off the uniform, we will serve you as well as you’ve served us – because no one who fights for this country should have to fight for a job, or a roof over their head, or the care that they need when they come home.

Why don’t they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.

So you cannot, as a Christian, walk away from Africa.

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man’s estate, is the gift of education.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they’ll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

My mother is not educated but keeps in touch with world events through news on TV.

The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: ‚Does your teacher use class time well?‘ and, ‚When you’re confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?‘

Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

Besides entertainment and action, I want to educate. You know, as a producer or director, we do have a responsibility to society.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

I am no supporter of factory labor for children, but I have never joined with those who clamored against proper work of children on farms outside their school hours.

By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

A teacher should have a creative mind.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

When I was five I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Swimming has its educational value – mental, moral, and physical – in giving you a sense of mastery over an element, and of power of saving life, and in the development of wind and limb.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.

No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern.

I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I hope that people around the world will be as inspired as I am to step up and to speak out on behalf of girls around the world who struggle to go to school.

Information, education, skills, healthcare, livelihood, financial inclusion, small and village enterprises, opportunities for women, conservation of natural resources, distributed clean energy – entirely new possibilities have emerged to change the development model.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Like other kids wanted to become firemen or astronauts, I wanted to make people laugh.

The fifth freedom is freedom from ignorance.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, ‚If wet, in the library.‘ Who could say that this is bad?

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Because I know about the Holy Land, I’ve taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and – but you can’t bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Without education, your children can never really meet the challenges they will face. So it’s very important to give children education and explain that they should play a role for their country.