We human beings are not prepared at all for the explosion of new practices the Internet will produce. Education is going to be in networks and it will not be about knowledge. It will be about being successful in relationships, about how to make offers, how to build trust, how to cultivate prudence and emotional resilience.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. TALENT will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. GENIUS will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. EDUCATION will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On,” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Our education systems and workplaces plunge us into deep mental ruts. They reward competencies that are self-reinforcing, not diversifying, and they encourage people to acquire domain expertise rather than to ask stupid questions and learn new things. We need to find our way out of these ruts and rekindle the creativity that many of us left behind in childhood.

We need to change our educational experience drastically, from one in which we learn to “know” something, toward one in which we learn to “learn” something. The old learn-to-know model is an outcome of the needs of the industrial revolution. Today, some 200 years later, we need to educate for the knowledge economy, which requires a completely different tool set and therefore a different educational experience.

My worry-and this is not limited to business schools-is that we have created a context in which people want the status of a profession without any of the constraints of a profession. A profession is not only about the benefits that you claim. It's also about what you renounce.

I think one of the roles of a professional school in higher education is to make clear to the students not only the privileges they get but also the responsibilities that they have, and then to create the necessary governance systems to ensure that those responsibilities are fulfilled to the best of everyone's ability.

Education...is not confined to time or space, it is an attitude, a constant search for learning founded on an insatiable curiosity. An "educated" person is not only someone who knows a great deal, but someone who wishes to learn in any circumstance, who poses questions, who probes, reflects and assimilates, to gain both knowledge and wisdom.

There would be no strength in relying on the teachings of others without a basic capacity for self-reliance. To rely upon the strength and resources of others without a firm purpose of one's own is a sign of weakness.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

If you want a two year break from life, go to business school. If you want to meet a bunch of new, generally smart, and always interesting people, go to business school. If you are a techie but like the business side of things, want to get an intellectual (and functional grounding) in business stuff, want a two year break from life, and want to meet interesting people, go to business school.

Education for adults is basically experience understood in tranquility. In other words, you have the experience and then you can go away to a place of tranquility like a school or a course and reflect with the help of people who give you some concepts on what you've learnt or what you've experienced. Then you go off and do it hopefully better next time. And come back again. School is where there should be oceans of tranquility in a turbulent world. It is where you pause and reflect on what you've been doing and put some sense into it.

Business schools teach you the language of business, and that's quite useful. It's like if you want to go to work in France you have to learn French. It doesn't mean you're going to be very good in France, but it's good to learn the language. I think that what business schools do is to teach you the language of business and some managerial skills, that sort of stuff. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be any kind of a good businessman, manager or even a good leader.

When it comes to business education, for better or worse -- and I think for worse -- business schools are followers, not leaders. Typically, business schools hold their finger up to the wind and ask, What do our customers want? They have two kinds of customers. One is the people who are doing the hiring, and the other is the students. I happen to think that's a pernicious concept -- the idea that students are customers -- because it assumes that students know best what kind of education they should have. But that is the culture in most business schools.

Over the last fifteen years there have been a lot of ratings of business schools, and these ratings are very akin to customer-satisfaction ratings. You're basically asking the students, How good was the experience? That presumes that the students know what it is that they should be learning, or whether the environment in a particular school is better than another school that they never attended. And that attitude really undermines the notion of education. If you don't believe that the educational institution and the professors know more about the learning process than you do, then you shouldn't bother to go to the school. The notion that these are customers deflates a lot of quality; if professors are constantly rated on how well the students like them and the course, then the rigor and challenge of the course is oftentimes diluted. In other words, the measure of the professor's success in the classroom is an artificial measure. So all these ratings have had the effect of dumbing down the curriculum of a lot of business schools.

Confucius was once asked what should be done for the betterment of the people. His answer was to do two things: educate the people and make them wealthy. Education bred an understanding of the uses of wealth; wealth made possible the benefits of education, and both led to personal development.

All education springs from some image of the future. It springs from some implicit assumptions about what the future holds. When your kid comes home and says "Why do I need to learn algebra?" you don't say, "Because our forefathers learned it." You tell them that you'll need it in the future. That assumes you know what the future has to hold. You'll need algebra, or you'll need marketing, or something. That presupposes that the parents and the curricula designers and the educators are making a set of assumptions about what the society, the colony of the world, is going to be like.

If the winners are the inventors of products, the education of the top 2 5 percent of the labor force is critical, because someone in that group will invent the new products. If the winners are the cheapest and best producers of products, the education of the bottom 50 percent of the population moves center stage, because this part of the work force must master the new processes. If the bottom 50 percent cannot learn what must be learned, new high-tech processes cannot be employed. If a firm or country is to be successful, each and every worker must have high-tech skills.

Socrates says that writing forces us to follow an argument rather than to participate in it, and I think you see that all the time when the professor is giving a lecture. Students are writing their notes, trying to follow the argument, and abandon any hope of participating in it.

I keep six honest serving-men.
(They taught me all I knew,)
Their names are What and Why and When,
And How and Where and Who

It's what you learn after you know everything that counts.

The case method does little to cultivate caution. Decisiveness is rewarded, not inaction. Students can become trigger-happy as a result, committed "to taking action where action may not be justified or to force a solution where none is feasible." Class discussions can easily polarize. Persuasiveness is valued-but not publicly changing one's own mind. Few students do so in the course of discussion; if anything, positions tend to harden as debate continues. Skilled managers, by contrast, try to stay flexible, altering their positions as new evidence and arguments emerge.

Law school worships understanding, business school worships skill. Law-school students scrutinize what has been done. If business-school students don't quite learn by doing, they learn how things have been done.

The first time you say something, it's heard, the second time, it's recognized, and the third time, it's learned.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.