In Defense of a Liberal Education Quotes

“The crucial challenge is to learn how to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas—and most of all to enjoy the intellectual adventure enough to be able to do them easily and often.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. —E. O. Wilson”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Being forced to write clearly means, first, you have to think clearly.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“the central virtue of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to write, and writing makes you think. Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly, and reasonably quickly will prove to be an invaluable skill.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“As John Adams famously wrote during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” So maybe today they’re writing apps rather than studying poetry, but that’s an adjustment for the age.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“liberal education should give people the skills “that will help them get ready for their sixth job, not their first job.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantages.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The Yale report explained that the essence of liberal education was “not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions; but to lay the foundation which is common to them all.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Frederick Douglass saw the same connection. When his master heard that young Frederick was reading well, he was furious, saying, “Learning will spoil the best nigger in the world. If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass recalled that he “instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The solution is not that people need to major in marketing in college, but that their liberal education should be more structured and demanding. Majors should have some required sequence of basic courses, as in economics.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“the test scores used in admissions are a measure of what colleges take in, not what they produce. The fact that an Ivy League school has freshmen with high SAT scores tells us that it is a good magnet for talent but nothing else. What should matter is how students, including those with low SAT scores, improve over the course of their time in school.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The basic problem for American workers of all ages has been that their hours and productivity keep rising but their wages do not.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Walter Lippmann was once asked his views on a particular topic, he is said to have replied, “I don’t know what I think on that one. I haven’t written about it yet.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“After centuries of bemoaning the fact that the young are too rebellious and disrespectful, the problem today, it appears, is that they are not rebellious and disrespectful enough. They aren’t willing to challenge conventional wisdom, neither the liberal pieties that offended Allan Bloom nor the conservative ones that gall Deresiewicz. After having been pilloried for trying to destroy the bourgeois order in the 1960s and 1970s, the youth are now scorned for being too bourgeois.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Civically engaged, business oriented, technology obsessed, and socially skilled, Franklin was "our founding Yuppie," declares the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Franklin "would have felt right at home in the information revolution," Walter Isaacson writes in his biography of the statesman. "We can easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan of a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas." The essence of Franklin's appeal is that he was brilliant but practical, interested in everything, but especially in how things work.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“For Jefferson, there was one step crucial to creating a genuine natural aristocracy. The poor and rich had to have equal access to a good education. That's why, despite being soemthing of a liberatarian, he repeatedly proposed that the state pay for universal primary education as well as fund education at later stages. He was met with opposition from many quarters, mostly those wary of big government or highter taxes. Yet interestingly, one of this most ardent supporters was an old friend and political opponent, the conservative John Adams. "The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it," Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The Romans saw loss of virtue all around them. The Victorians decried the decline in religiosity in the next generation.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are far more important symbols than any politician today, and they occupy the space that iconic political figures did in earlier eras.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The crucial challenge is to learn how to read critically, analyze data, and formulate ideas—and”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“repeatedly proposed that the state pay for universal primary education as well as fund education at later stages. He was met with opposition from many quarters, mostly those wary of big government or higher taxes. Yet interestingly, one of his most ardent supporters was an old friend and political opponent, the conservative John Adams.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Norman Augustine (the former Lockheed Martin CEO) stressed the importance of both scientific skills and humanistic thought: So what does business need from our educational system? One answer is that it needs more employees who excel in science and engineering. . . . But that is only the beginning; one cannot live by equations alone. The need is increasing for workers with greater foreign-language skills and an expanded knowledge of economics, history, and geography. And who wants a technology-driven economy if those who drive it are not grounded in such fields as ethics? . . . Certainly when it comes to life’s major decisions, would it not be well for the leaders and employees of our government and our nation’s firms to have knowledge of the thoughts of the world’s great philosophers and the provocative dilemmas found in the works of great authors and playwrights? I believe the answer is a resounding “yes.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“crucial element of Greek education. In the city-state of Sparta, the most extreme example of this focus, young boys considered weak at birth were abandoned to die. The rest were sent to grueling boot camps, where they were toughened into Spartan soldiers from an early age. Around the fifth century BC, some Greek city-states, most notably Athens, began to experiment with a new form of government. “Our constitution is called a democracy,” the Athenian statesman Pericles noted in his funeral oration, “because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Education Arne Duncan has estimated that Chinese students spend 25 to 30 percent longer a year in school than their American counterparts.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“The most recent edition of the test—called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—was conducted in 2012, and it found that among the OECD’s thirty-four members, the United States ranked twenty-seventh, twentieth, and seventeenth in math, science, and reading, respectively.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“Victoria Principal—she”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

“forces you to make choices and brings clarity and order to your ideas.”
― Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education