...talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.

School has clear rules. Life often doesn’t.

Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

They’re schemers, so they see schemes.

Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldn't be learning respect for authority, they'd be learning logic.
So go crazy with the rules — the time your child spends trying to figure them out is time he won't be stapling firecrackers to the neighbor's dog.

Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.

The principle of my school is quite different. In the other schools, techniques are displayed like merchandise adorned with colors and flowers, so they can be turned into a way of making a living, which is not the true way.

The students had every right to set their own rules, but I had the right to say their rules were stupid and make fun of them.

Invention hovers always a little above the rules.

If judges are pragmatic, as I think they largely are in our system, it can only be in the everyday sense of the term. But immediately the counterexample of Holmes, a gifted and serious though not systematic philosophical thinker, comes to mind.