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“I wish them to be taught to think.”
Education should produce independent judgment rather than polished imitation, so the ability to think becomes more important than accumulating accomplishments for display.
Source note: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; the sentence summarizes Wollstonecraft’s preference for understanding over decorative instruction.
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“Liberty is the experimental condition for studying the phenomena of the child's attention.”
Montessori argues that attention can be studied meaningfully only when children have enough freedom for spontaneous patterns of attention to become visible.
Source note: Spontaneous Activity in Education, discussion of attention. The surrounding physiological terminology is early-twentieth-century educational psychology and is preserved as historical theory rather than modern clinical evidence.
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“All men by nature desire to know.”
Aristotle treats the desire for knowledge as a basic human tendency, giving curiosity a foundational place in the movement from perception toward understanding.
Source note: Metaphysics, Book I, chapter 1, W. D. Ross translation; the work opens with this claim before discussing sensation, memory, experience, art, and knowledge.
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“education ought to do more for a boy”
Washington rejects an overly narrow definition of schooling and asks whether education can improve the practical conditions and responsibilities of life.
Source note: Working With the Hands, Chapter I; Project Gutenberg #64504. This short excerpt precedes Washington’s discussion of poverty, family responsibility and practical education.
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“And pause awhile from Learning to be wise;”
Johnson distinguishes accumulating learning from exercising judgment, asking the scholar to interrupt pursuit of knowledge long enough to examine what wisdom requires.
Source note: The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), Johnson’s imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire; the line introduces a section on the hazards and disappointments surrounding learned ambition.
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“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”
James resists treating every possible intellectual mistake as catastrophic, because an excessive fear of error can itself prevent inquiry, experience and the possibility of gaining truth.
Source note: The Will to Believe, essay “The Will to Believe”; Project Gutenberg #26659. James is contrasting the risk of being mistaken with the cost of refusing every uncertain intellectual venture.