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Education Quotes by Louis Menand

16 Education quotes by Louis Menand

All Education quotes Louis Menand’s page

When you scroll through Menand’s thoughts, you’ll notice a steady pull between tradition and change. He often frames learning as a conversation across generations, highlighting how schools both preserve and challenge cultural norms. The selection offers a compact yet nuanced look at his take on the classroom, policy, and the broader purpose of knowledge.

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I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

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Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

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You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

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My own view is that the general education curriculum that a college picks has to be appropriate for the kind of student…

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I don't think that you want to see universities in any way trying to have any kind of quota system about political…

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Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know…

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One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests…

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The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're…

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It's generally sort of sociologically observed that the better educated people are, the more liberal they tend to be, which would suggest…

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The way universities operate is the decision about what students need for the degree are... is the decision made by the faculty.

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Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and…

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Getting faculties to come to a consensus about something that they've never really thought about or had to worry about in their…

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I think at a place like Harvard, our experience, I was involved with, at various stages, in trying to implement a new…

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“[Dewey’s ‘Reflex Arc’ paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which…

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It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their…

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Harvard has something that manages, I think, to provide a lot of options for students, but still fairly prescriptive about the kinds…

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More by Louis Menand

“For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is…

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If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the…

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Basically what you want in any profession - I would say the same thing if I were a lawyer or a doctor - is…

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“In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of…

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One of the functions of literary criticism, or reviewing, generally - and I, most of my reviews actually are not about literature - but…

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You have to have students wanting to take the courses, otherwise you're not going, they're not going to be very effective.

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“We do not (on Holmes’s reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can…

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Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

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“[According to Holmes], ‘Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that…

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It's difficult to get a job and people stay in school longer because they're employed as teaching assistants or instructors by their schools, by…

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Just in higher education alone, more people go to college now, by enormous amounts, than went to college in the '50's and '60's. So…

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Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students…

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Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

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“What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations…

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Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic. Never, btw, ask that androgynous paper clip anything.…

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