Did Yeats really write this?

Cafe Society
1

I thought I would ask this question here, inspired by this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=147953#newpost

(Even though we haven’t nailed that one yet–but an apocryphal quote would be hard to substantiate either way.)

“Education is not filling a pail. It is lighting a fire.” --W.B. Yeats.

I looked it up in Google, but all I found was this as a quote, none giving the specific source. I googled some Yeats sites that allowed searches, and still nothing.

So: can anybody confirm if this is legit? It just doesn’t sound like him, somehow. Also, I thought I once saw this quote attributed to Piaget.

(Have some googly-moogly.)

2

After way too much time searching, I couldn’t confirm the quote origin (although every source I found did attribute it to Yeats).

My guess is that this is not a line from a poem or prose work, but something that Yeats said in one of his speeches to the Irish Senate (he made a number of speeches on the Irish educational system). You’d probably have to find a collection of the text of his speeches to be sure.