“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
Henry David Thoreau (one -time public school teacher)
“Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.”
William Bruce Cameron (sociologist)
"If you insist on measuring everything you value, you will end up valuing only what can be measured."
“You go to school at the age of twelve or thirteen; and for the next four or five years you are not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours that you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from lost illusions. But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible, in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.”
Words of an Eton master, William Johnson Cory, 1861