On the costs of formal education:
"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."
On formal education vs. learning by doing:
"If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and science, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighbourhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life...Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month - the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this - or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?"
On lifelong learning:
"It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure - if they are indeed, so well off - to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?"
I love these.
