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.