The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think

Our ideas of education take too narrow and too low a range. There is need of a broader scope, a higher aim. True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study. It means more than a preparation for the life that now is. It has to do with the whole being, and with the whole period of existence possible to man. It is the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers. It prepares the student for the joy of service in this world and for the higher joy of wider service in the world to come.

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.

Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college — that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home — is redefined as a problem.

A college education was for me life-changing. It gave me a life-long passion for reading and learning. It challenged my narrowness and parochialism-really forced open my mind. It deepened my commitment to culture in general and to the higher forms of pleasure. Thus it enriched my life-permanently-by confirming me in habits of mind that would benefit me all my life long. Anyone observing could have seen that happening to me (and my fellow students) at the time. A real education is life-changing. You don't go to classes during the week and get drunk in dance bars on the weekend. You discover a higher level of life and pleasure, and you start living it. If the education takes, you keep living it the rest of your life. [...] Education releases you for real joy in the midst of a culture that is abysmally cheap and shabby. The people around you pursue TV, sports, and shopping-- obey the commands of their masters to indulge themselves in every way and not to question the value of what they are fed by the media. But the educated man is critical and even self-critical: he THINKS about things-even things like pleasure. Mindless self-indulgence is no longer enough when you have learned to think.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, he [Einstein] said.

Civilization depends not only upon the knowledge of the people, but upon the use they make of it. If knowledge be wrongfully used, civilization commits suicide. Broadly speaking, the college is not to educate the individual, but to educate society. The individual may be ignorant and vicious. If society have learning and virtue, that will sustain him. If society lacks learning and virtue, it perishes. Education must give not only power but direction. It must minister to the whole man or it fails.

Education means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light by which men can only be made free.

The true purpose of education is to prepare young men and women for effective citizenship in a free form of government.

Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.

The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

College is where you're supposed to find out things about yourself, discover your voice, and discover what moves you and what makes you passionate.

College is fantastic for a variety of reasons, but that opportunity to bond with people of very different backgrounds, to pull knowledge-big and small-from such a diverse pool, is invaluable, especially in the formative years.

Education has to do with insight, with valuing, with understanding, with the development of the power of discrimination, the ability to make choice amongst the possibilities of experience and to think and act in ways that distinguish men from animals and higher men from lower.