There is no need of a teacher for those who know how to think.
Every home is a university and the parents are the teachers.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
A wise parent allows the children to make mistakes. It is good for them once in a while to burn their fingers.
Responsibility will mellow and sober the youth and prepare them, for the burden they must discharge.
Real education has to draw out the best from the boys and girls to be educated. This can never be done by packing ill-assorted and unwanted information into the heads of the pupils. It becomes a dead weight crushing all originality in them and turning them into mere automata.
An intellect that is developed through the medium of socially useful labour will be an instrument for service and will not easily be led astray or fall into devious paths.
I hold that, as the largest part of our time is devoted to labour for earning our bread, our children must from their infancy be taught the dignity of such labour.
Craft, art, health and education should all be integrated into one scheme.
Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.
Part 1. Our first duty is that we should not be a burden on society, i.e., we should be self-dependent. From this point of view self-sufficiency itself is a kind of service.
Part 2. After becoming self-sufficient we shall use our spare time for the service of others. If all become self-sufficient, none will be in trouble.
Given the right kind of teachers, our children will be taught the dignity of labour and learn to regard it as an integral part and a means of their intellectual growth, and to realize that it is patriotic to pay for their training through their labour.
It is for you and me to show that no vice is inherent in man.
Education must be of a new type for the sake of the creation of a new world.
Character cannot be built with mortar and stone. It cannot be built by hands other than your own. The Principal and the Professor cannot give you character from the pages of books. Character building comes from their very lives really speaking, it must come from within yourselves.
When it is remembered that the primary aim of all education is, or should be, the moulding of the character of pupils, a teacher who has a character to keep need not lost heart.
If teachers impart all the knowledge in the world to their students but inculcate not truth and purity among them, they will have betrayed them and instead of raising them set them on the downward road to perdition.
Knowledge without character is a power for evil only, as seen in the instances of so many talented thieves and ‘gentlemen rascals’ in the world.
Persistent questioning and healthy inquisitiveness are the first requisite for acquiring learning of any kind.
There can be no knowledge without humility and the will to learn.
Literary training by itself adds not an inch to one’s moral height and that character-building is independent of literary training.
The students should be, above all, humble and correct… The greatest to remain great has to be the lowliest by choice.
The utterly false idea that intelligence can be developed only through book-reading should give place to the truth that the quickest development of the mind can be achieved by artisan’s work being learnt in a scientific manner.
We have up to now concentrated on stuffing children’s minds with all kinds information, without ever thinking of stimulating and developing them. Let us now cry a halt and concentrate on education the child properly through manual work, not as a side activity, but as the prime means of intellectual training.
You have to train the boys in one occupation or another. Round this special occupation you will train up his mind, his body, his handwriting, his artistic sense, and so on. He will be master of the craft he learns.
If India is not to declare spiritual bankruptcy, religious instruction of its youth must be held to be at least as necessary as secular instruction.
It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts.
Man will ever remain imperfect, and it will always be his part to try to be perfect.
Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.
There will have to be rigid and iron discipline before we achieve anything great and enduring, and that discipline will not come by mere academic argument and appeal to reason and logic. Discipline is learnt in the school of adversity.
There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.
An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
