Skip to content

Education Quotes by Thomas M. Nichols

16 Education quotes by Thomas M. Nichols

All Education quotes Thomas M. Nichols’s page

Nichols’ voice cuts straight to the core of what schooling should achieve, balancing practical concerns with deeper ideals. His remarks frequently juxtapose the mechanics of instruction with the larger social mission of education, giving readers a concise window into his perspective on reform and responsibility.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

“College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience.”

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“Some educators even repeat the old saw that “I learn as much from my students as they learn from me!” (With due…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“I was a straight-A student at a university” does not mean what it did in 1960 or even 1980. A study of…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“Students, well intentioned or otherwise, are poorly served by the idea that students and teachers are intellectual and social equals and that…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“It was probably inevitable that the anti-intellectualism of American life would invade college campuses, but that is no reason to surrender to…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“What is different today, and especially worrisome when it comes to the creation of educated citizens, is how the protective, swaddling environment…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It is…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what’s true and what’s false, and where…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“There is no way around the reality that students are too often wasting their money and obtaining the illusion of an education…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for civil rights…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“This sense of entitlement is one reason they are continually angry at “experts” and especially at “elitists,” a word that in modern…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“The two most important facts about grade inflation, however, are that it exists and that it suffuses students with unwarranted confidence in…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“The American attachment to intellectual self-reliance described by Tocqueville survived for nearly a century before falling under a series of assaults from…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

Other authors on Education

More by Thomas M. Nichols

“Conspiracy theorists manipulate all tangible evidence to fit their explanation, but worse, they will also point to the absence of evidence as even stronger…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“Today, by contrast, students explode over imagined slights that are not even remotely in the same category as fighting for civil rights or being…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“People do not come to the Internet so that their bad information can be corrected or their cherished theories disproven. Rather, they ask the…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“If the public has no idea about the substance of an issue, and will vote based on who they like rather than what they…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it’s the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge. This is new in American culture,…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“The requirements of a degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), a demanding foreign language, or a rigorous degree in the humanities…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“In 2015, a Massachusetts accountant named Stephen Pasceri lost his seventy-eight-year-old mother to cardiovascular disease. Mrs. Pasceri had a long history of health trouble,…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image

“The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not…

Thomas M. Nichols

Image