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"The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward."
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"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."
"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."
"Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."
"If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"
"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."
"Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems."
"We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue."
Explore more quotes by John Knowles
"Exeter was, I suspect, more crucial in my life than in the lives of most members of my class, and conceivably, than in the lives of almost anyone else who ever attended the school."
"Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out."
"There are simply more young people than there ever were. You get this feeling of strength. Also, large numbers can be a drawback, making it difficult to lose one's anonymity."
"Looking back, I think we were all quite mature, surprisingly responsible. In earlier wars, boys of our age had just gone off to raise hell or enlist or both, but we stayed dutifully at our desks doing tomorrow's homework."
"My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education."
"The best teaching I ever experienced was at Exeter. Yale was a distinct letdown afterward."
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