Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?.. Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?.. And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?.. Is not the great defect of our education today---a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned---that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects, " we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. . Dorothy L. Sayers
About This Quote

The problem is that we have become too reliant on education. We expect our children to learn everything that they need to know in order to navigate the world, then we send them off into the world without ever giving them the tools or skills that will allow them to think for themselves and make their own decisions.

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More Quotes By Dorothy L. Sayers
  1. Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
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  4. To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life., 8 September 1935)
  5. See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in...
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