T.S. Eliot on Modern Education

Tracey Lee Simmons provides some great quotations form T S Eliot on education.

Simmons, in Climbing Mount Parnassus, writes, "T.S.Eliot, a poet and critic with much to say about education was convinced that any culture worthy of survival must work unstintingly to preserve itself and resist the modern, ideologically driven tendency "to create bodies of men and women - of all classes - detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words a mob " which is "no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed and well disciplined.""

Eliot, "It would be a pity if we overlooked the possibilities of education as a means of acquiring wisdom; if we belittled the acquisition of knowledge for the satisfaction of curiosity, without any further motive than the desire to know; and if we lost our respect for learning."

"No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest - for it is the part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude".