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Monday, July 8, 2013

Quotes on Education

Excellent quotes on Education   and some interesting links and works                                                                                                      
Melinda Abitz  Fifth Grade Teacher
The word accomplished is a relative term. We're accomplished when the students and teacher both learn something. As teachers we can never achieve perfection, only strive to do our best and enjoy the journey. An accomplished teacher is someone who learns to eat their lunch in six minutes.


Philip C. Abrami  Professor of Psychology University of Manitoba
Computers may enhance student learning by increasing access to information, making learning more intrinsically interesting, and encourage the learner to become self-directed. But man is a social animal; learning is a social exercise as well as an individual, private event. Successful integration of computers into the classroom may be enhanced by active collaboration among learners and between students and teachers.

Marcel Achard
When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.

Chinua Achebe (b. 1930) Nigerian writer
Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.

Henry Adams (1838-1918) American historian
What you do speaks so loudly I can't hear what you are saying.
Your lack of planning does not constitute a crisis in my work plan.
A teacher touches eternity ... he or she will never know where his/her influence stops.
They know enough who know how to learn. Henry Adams
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

John Adams  Diary March 15, 1756
I sometimes in my sprightly moments consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world, in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockle shells, &c., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society. Some rattle and thunder out A, B, C, with as much fire and impetuosity as Alexander fought, and very often sit down and cry as heartily upon being outspelt, as Caesar did, when at Alexander's sepulchre he recollected that the Macedonian hero had conquered the world before his age. At one table sits Mr. Insipid, foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig , or playing with his fingers, as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane or rattles his snuff-box. At another, sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about "Adams fall, in which we sinned all," as his Primer has it. In short, my little school. . . . . " "In short, my little school, like the great world, is made up of kings, politicians, divines, L. D's[1], fops, buffoons, fiddlers, sycophants, fools, coxcombs, chimney sweepers, and every other character drawn in history, or seen in the world. Is it not, then, the highest pleasure, my friend, to preside in this little world, to bestow the proper applause upon virtuous and generous actions, to blame and punish every vicious and contracted trick, to wear out of the tender mind every thing that is mean and little, and fire the new-born soul with a noble ardour and emulation? The world affords no greater pleasure.
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. Letters to his Wife: Vol. II_Letter #78, 1780


Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger teacher of Ludwig van Beethoven
He has never learned anything, and he can do nothing in decent style.


A. Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
[The true teacher] inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.

Louisa May Alcott
A child her wayward pencil drew
On margins of her book;
Garlands of flower, dancing elves,
Bud, butterfly, and brook,
Lessons undone, and plum forgot,
Seeking with hand and heart
The teacher whom she learned to love
Before she knew t'was Art.

Brian Aldiss
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

Barbara J. Alexander
How can we hope to remain economically competitive in a world in which...90% of Dutch high-school students take advanced math courses and 100% of teachers in Germany have double majors, while the best we can say about our pocket of excellence is that 75% of [American] students have learned to critique tactfully?

Gracie Allen
When I was born, I was so surprised I couldn't talk for a year and a half.

Woody Allen
I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.
We live in a world with too many moving parts.
And my parents finally realize that I'm kidnapped and they snap into action immediately: They rent out my room.

William Allin
Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions.

Betty B. Anderson
When you are a teacher you are always in the right place at the right time. There is no wrong time for learning.

Christopher Andreae 
Ignorance is a right!  Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us.  

Maya Angelou
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

Anonymous/Unknown
All children are gifted. Some just open their presents later than others.
It's children that pull us toward love and everyday business that pushes us away.

...because they are children and for no other reason they have dignity and worth simply because they are ...
The more I encourage a child to think for himself, the more he will care what I think.

Parenthood: the art of bringing up children without putting them down.

Where teachers are building temples
With loving and infinite care,
Planning each arch with patience,
Laying each stone with prayer,
The temple the teacher is building
Will last while the ages roll;
For that beautiful unseen temple
Is a child's immortal soul.
A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.
There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.
The worst danger that confronts the younger generation is the example set by the older generation.
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
By the time a girl becomes a teenager, her parents are so old that she cannot do anything with them.
A teenager is always too tired to hold a dishcloth, but never too tired to hold a phone.
There's nothing wrong with teenagers that trying to reason with them won't aggravate.
A baby usually wakes up in the wee-wee hours of the morning.
Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.
On some days I feel like I'm dying in the classroom - on other days I know that I'm changing the world.  

Anon. Teacher
A wise man is one who finally realizes that there are some questions one can ask which may have no answers.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.
A college education never hurt anybody who was willing to learn after he got it. –

Author Unknown
Education is not received. It is achieved.
It is what we learn after we think we know it all, that counts.
Shortchange your education now and you may be short of change the rest of your life. –

 Author Unknown
Television commercials are educational. They teach you how stupid advertisers think you are.
The truly educated man is that rare individual who can separate reality from illusion. –
 Author Unknown
Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates...
Learn while you're young and not while you're old, that a good education is better than gold, for silver and gold will all melt away, but a good education will never decay.
The best way to learn is to become a teacher.
The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
A wise man is one who finally realizes that there are some questions one can ask which may have no answers.
It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Simply being different isn't wrong. Don't try to be a duckling if you're born to be a swan.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
Your Education is worth what You are worth.
It is what we learn after we think we know it all, that counts.
Learning is like rowing upstream. Advance or lose all.
We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.
Nothing grieves a child more than to study the wrong lesson and learn something he wasn't supposed to.
School and education should not be confused; it is only school that can be made easy.
The only thing that children wear out faster than shoes are parents and teachers.
Education can help you earn more. But not many schoolteachers can prove it.

Neither written word nor spoken plea
Can teach young ears
What men should be
Not all the books on the shelves
But what teachers are themselves.
(Note to student's parents from an English schoolmaster)
If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at this school, I'll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home. 
The amount of education you have determines your loot in life.   
The accent may be on youth these days but the stress is still on the teacher.

It's not the IQ but the I WILL that is most important in education. 
Puberty is the period when students stop asking questions and begin to question answers.
An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.
If you plan for a decade, plant a tree. If you plan for a century, teach the children.

Hannah Arendt (German-born American political scientist, 1906-1975)
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save it from that ruin, which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. An education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their choice of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.


Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.)
The statesman therefore must legislate with all these considerations in view, both in respect of the parts of the soul and of their activities, and aiming more particularly at the greater goods and the ends. And the same principle applies in regard to modes of life and choices of conduct: A man should be capable of engaging in business and war, but still more capable of living in peace and leisure; and he should do what is necessary and useful, but still more should he do what is noble. These then are the aims that ought to be kept in view in the education of the citizens both while still children and at the later ages that require education.
One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. 
We cannot learn without pain.
The one exclusive sign of a thorough knowledge is the power of teaching. 
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.  
Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead. 
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than even their parents, for these only give them life; those the art of living well.
Education is the best provision for old age.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.


Roger Ascham (1515-68)
There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.  

Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1908-1984) New Zealand teacher
The truth is that I am enslaved . . . in one vast love affair with 70 children. 
[Teaching] is a potent drunkenness, an exhilaration, and it is one that does not leave depression in its wake.




Isaac Asimov
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...'
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

Fred Astaire
The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.

Mary Astor  (American Film Actress)
Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer - into selflessness which links us to all humanity.

W. H. Auden  (Anglo-American poet and teacher 1907–73)
Of course, Behaviorism "works." So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those with whom I love, I can: All of them make me laugh.

Richard Bach
You teach best what you most need to learn.

Francis Bacon (English philosopher 1561 - 1626) 
Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.

Walter Bagehot (1826-77)
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

Desmond Bagley
If a man is a fool, you don't train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.

Charles Baillargé  (from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 1894)
Let us beware of "too much education."  There is a danger of overdoing the thing and thus causing or inciting our would-be agriculturists to be dissatisfied with their parents' mode of livelihood. 

James Baldwin (American writer, 1924-1987)
Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.
In order to have a conversation with someone you must reveal yourself.
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
It is very nearly impossible  . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

Lucille Ball
You see much more of your children once they leave home.

Dr. Elliott Barker Director, Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
Kids who have their needs met early by loving parents ... are subjected totally and thoroughly to the most severe form of 'discipline' conceivable: they don’t do what you don’t want them to do because they love you so much!
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!

Jacques Barzun
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Francesco Basily
[He is] average and certain to prove mediocre.
principal of the Royal and Imperial Conservatory of Milan on rejecting the application of composer-musician Guiseppe Verdi to study at the conservatory

James Beattie  
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.

Simone de Beauvoir (On her early teachers)
These worthy schoolteachers were not overburdened with diplomas, but as far as devotion and morality were concerned, they were second to none; they wore plum-colored silk blouses that caressed my cheeks when they pressed me to their bosoms. 

Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) British author
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.

Bernard Iddings Bell, chaplain, University of Chicago
A good education is not so much one which prepares a man to succeed in the world, as one which enables him to sustain a failure.

J.G. Bennett (1897-1974) American writer
To be able to learn is to be young, and whoever keeps the joy of learning in him or her remains forever young.

William J. Bennett  (U.S. Secretary of Education)
If my own son, who is now 10 months, came to me and said, "You promised to pay for my tuition at Harvard: how about giving me $50,000 instead to start a little business?"  I might think that was a good idea.

Hector Louis Berlioz
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

John Betjeman
Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows. Summoned by Bells

M. Bevan-Brown, M.D. The Sources of Love and Fear
Never leave a baby alone to cry. This is an absolute rule. He may be crying because he is hungry, cold, too hot, wet, etc; if so, these things may be attended to. But he may be none of these things; he may be crying because he is frightened, and if not reassured early this is a dangerous condition. If an infant in the early weeks and months of life is allowed to remain frightened and alone, his first impression of the world into which he has come is that it is inhospitable, dangerous and lonely, and there is no use seeking help. He must try to fend for himself and not expect help; but he cannot fend for himself; he is helpless. It is not a matter for surprise that such impressions may color his view of the world and the people in it permanently. Much of his subsequent conduct will be devoted to the object of making himself as secure as he can in an insecure world.

Bible
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Ambrose Bierce 
Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Black Elk
Grown men can learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.

Tony Blair  (British Prime Minister)
Ask me my three main priorities for Government, and I tell you: education, education and education. 

Jan Blaustone  The Joy of Parenthood
The best security blanket a child can have is parents who respect each other.

Allan Bloom
Education is the movement from darkness to light.
Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

Derek Bok
If you think education is expensive try ignorance.

Erma Bombeck
Education is so important when it comes to domesticity. I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.

Daniel Boorstin
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge.

Dr. James Borland
Acceleration is one of the most curious phenomena in the field of education. I can think of no other issue in which there is such a gulf between what research has revealed and what practitioners believe. The research on acceleration is so uniformly positive, the benefits of appropriate acceleration so unequivocal, that it is difficult to see how an educator can oppose it.

Max Born
Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.

Ernest Boyer
A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130.

Nathaniel Branden
The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.

Thomas Bray  18th century Anglican minister
Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow.

Fawn M. Brodie
Housework is a breeze.
Cooking is a pleasant diversion.
Putting up a retaining wall is a lark.
But teaching is like climbing a mountain.
 
J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot, irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

Charlotte Bronte
We wove a web in childhood,
 A web of sunny air;
 We dug a spring in infancy
 Of water pure and fair;
 We sowed in youth a mustard seed,
 We cut an almond rod;
 We are now grown up to riper age--
 Are they withered in the sod?
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.

Henry Peter Brougham
Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. 


John Mason Brown
Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

Lenny Bruce
I won't say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like: What I'm going to be if I grow up.


Jerome Bruner 
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work.  But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.  


William Lowe Bryan  Education is...
One of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

Gunter Bubleit (Teacher and founder of Teachon)
The teacher who walks into the classroom ready to teach, is inferior to the one who walks in ready to learn.
The secret to getting kids turned on to learning is getting them connected in some way. They need to feel a surge of power before the lights can go on.
Violence to the Brain?
Teachers are fed up of being told to do brain surgery with a chain saw.
Why is it that teachers in their classrooms are expected to lead and exceed, while in their schools they are expected to follow and swallow?
Where are the most important educators on the planet today? they're standing in elementary and middle school classrooms all over the world; and that's as it should be, because that's where they are needed the most.
The only compelling reason for educational reform is self-reform.
In how many ways does a flower blossom? in how many seasons?  Nature says one thing - but what do we say?
Through experience and reflection, humankind discovers that real power and true happiness are associated with seeing the wholeness, or holiness of all things.
While theory is great for pointing the way, only the schoolteacher in the classroom knows how far we can go. 
Many teachers are far too busy listening to their principals to ever hear  themselves.
 

Gautma Buddha
Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.

Pearl S. Buck
I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

Sitting Bull (Dakota Sioux Chief, c. 1834-1890)
Go back home where you came from. This country is mine, and I intend to stay here and to raise this country full of grown people.
God made me an Indian, but not a reservation Indian.
What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say I am a thief. What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian. What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and unfed? Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am a Sioux; because I was born where my father lived; because I would die for my people and my country?
Let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make for our children.

Edward Bulwer Lytton (1831-1891)
It is a glorious fever, that desire to know.

Leo Burnett
Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.

Edmund Burke
Education is the cheap defense of nations.

William Burroughs
A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

Barbara Bush
At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.

George Bush (American President b. 1924)
Learning is good in and of itself . . . the mothers of the Jewish ghettoes of the east would pour honey on a book so the children would know that learning was sweet. 

Charles Buxton
The first duty to children is to make them happy, If you have not made them so, you have wronged them, No other good they may get can make up for that.

Robert Byrne
There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on . . .


John Cairdi
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

Dr Mary S Calderone
Before the child ever gets to school it will have received crucial, almost irrevocable sex education and this will have been taught by the parents, who are not aware of what they are doing.

Joseph Campbell
The goddess represents nature. The god represents society. And when you have a mythology that accents a god over a goddess you have a religion that accents society over nature. Then with the Fall, nature itself is cursed.
George Carlin
The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish writer
Permanence, perseverance, and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things it distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

Dr. Michael Carrera
Be aware of self-esteem programs, they can be seductive but offer short- term rewards. Self-esteem is caught not taught. A person must be around people who value them. In working with the child, the educator may have to pulverize concepts that the family has built over several years.

Lewis Carroll  (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied (to the question of what was taught in school), "and then the different branches of Arithmetic - Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." 
Child of the pure, unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy tale.   Through the Looking Glass



Rachael Carson  (1907-1964)
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.


Hodding Carter III
There are only two lasting bequests we could hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other is wings. 

George Washington Carver (American agricultural chemist, 1860-1943)
How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

Pablo Casals
You must work--- we must all work to make the world worthy of its children.

Fidel Castro
We must have teachers - a heroine in every classroom. 
To sow schools is to reap men.


Cato the Elder  (95 - 46 B.C.) 
Grasp the subject, the words will follow. 

Paul McClure
Behind each successful teacher is at least one student who knows how to operate the class computer and program the VCR.  

John Chambers, CEO. Cisco Systems 
The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education.  Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail look like a rounding error.

John Jay Chapman (1862-1923) American writer
The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

Lord Chesterfield
Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old. 

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) British author
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Winston Churchill (British Prime Minister, 1874-1965)
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught. 
The miracle of the wicked is reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human society, are created, strengthened and maintained.


Cicero (Roman orator 106 -43 B.C.) 
When you wish to instruct, be brief . . . Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind. 
The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.


John Jay Chapman (American writer 1862 - 1933)
The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

Frank A. Clark
Every adult needs a child to teach; it's the way adults learn.


J.M. Clarke
Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns.

Red Cloud (Oglala Sioux, 19th Century)
Look at me -- I am poor and naked, but I am the chief of the nation. We do not want riches, but we do want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good. We could not take them with us to the other world. We do not want riches. We want peace and love.

Barbara Colorose
If kids come to us [teachers] from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important.
If we force children to submit and attempt to control them we must accept that as they grow older and stronger we will face the violence we nurtured in them knowing indeed, we have taught them well.

C. C. Colton
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.

Confucius
If your plan is for one year, plant rice;
If your plan is for ten years, plant trees;
If your plan is for one hundred years, educate the children.


Eustace Conway
No arts or creativity. No passion. Just a slow monotone existence in oppressed ignorance. I asked if they knew what the word 'sacred' meant. They didn't know."


Charles Cook  (School Principal)
The doctor of philosophy who cannot make a simple wooden box is as poorly educated as the carpenter who cannot read.


Joan Ganz Cooney
Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society.


Thomas J. Cottle
For many children, joy comes as the result of mining something unique and wondrous about themselves from some inner shaft.

Marcelene Cox
Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

Confucius
If your plan is for one year, plant rice;
If your plan is for ten years, plant trees;
If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.
The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.

Pat Conroy (b. 1945) American writer
One can do anything, anything at all . . . if provided with a passionate and gifted teacher.


Eliza Cook  (A Song for the ragged Schools)
Better build schoolrooms for "the boy,"
Than cells and gibbets for "the man." 

Ted Cook
Parents: persons who spend half their time worrying how a child will turn out, and the rest of the time wondering when a child will turn in.

Bill Cosby
As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by "survival of the fittest.

My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own parenthood, but it didn't because parenting can be learned only by people who have no children.
Having a child is surely the most beautifully irrational act that two people in love can commit.
Human beings are the only creatures that allow their children to come back home.


Stephen Covey   The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  1989
Empathic listening is so powerful because it give you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives, and interpretation, you're dealing with the reality inside another person's head and heart. You're listening to understand.  You're focused on receiving the deep communication of another human soul. 


Marcelene Cox
Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.


Monta Crane
There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, employ someone to do it, or forbid your children from doing it.

Michael Crichton (b. 1942) American writer
Why teach? Why did Prometheus steal fire only to turn around and give it away? There is an inherent generosity in the human spirit-one of its faces is the face of the teacher.

Amanda Cross (b.1926) American writer
Perhaps teaching is really a mutual experience between the younger and the older, perhaps all there is to be learned is what they can discover between them.

Madame Marie Curie
All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

John Cotton Dana
Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

Clarence Darrow (American lawyer and reformer, 1857-1938)
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children.

Bette Davis
Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.
If you have never been hated by your children, you have never been a parent.
If you want a thing well done, get a couple of old broads to do it.

Simone De Beauvoir
It's frightening to think that you mark your children merely by being yourself. It seems unfair. You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do --or don't do.

Edward De Bono
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.

Dorothy De Zouche
If I were asked to enumerate ten educational stupidities, the giving of grades would head the list... If I can't give a child a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to lock my desk and go home and stay there.

Eugene Delacroix
What makes men of genius, or rather, what they make, is not new ideas, it is that idea - possessing them - that what has been said has still not been said enough.

Lloyd deMause
The evolution of culture is ultimately determined by the amount of love, understanding and freedom experienced by its children... Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.

Thomas Dewar
Minds are like parachutes.  They only function when they're open. 

John Dewey (1859-1952 U.S. philosopher and educator)
I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.
I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.
Education is a social process...Education is growth...Education is, not a preparation for life; Education is life itself.
The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.
The great waste comes from [the child's] inability to utilize the experience he gets outside of school in any complete and free way within the school itself while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school.  That is the isolation of the school - its isolation from life. 

The image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images that he himself forms with regard to it. If nine-tenths of the energy spent on instruction where spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.  Modern Education 1930
Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys . . . [yet] there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what pupils have learned.

Charles Dickens
I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

Emily Dickinson
There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away
Nor any courses like a page of prancing poetry
This traverse may the poorest take without oppress of toil
How frugal is the chariot that bears the human soul!
We meet no Stranger, but Ourself
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church
The Soul Selects her own Society
I'm nobody, Who are you?
Are you — Nobody, — too? …
How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!
Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without words
And never stops at all.
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain:
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
Ann Diehl Vogue Jan 85
I think we’re seeing in working mothers a change from “Thank God it’s Friday” to “Thank God it’s Monday.” If any working mother has not experienced that feeling, her children are not adolescent.
There are times when parenthood seems nothing more than feeding the hand that bites you.


Phyllis Diller
We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.
Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.
Tranquilizers work only if you follow the advice on the bottle--keep away from children.


Ernest Dimnet
Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. (The Art of Thinking)


Diogenes  ("The Cynic")
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough.

Benjamin Disraeli
Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

J. Frank Dobie
The average Ph.D. Thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
The soul is healed by being with children.

Every day and hour... see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little child, you pass by spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don't know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him, and it may grow... all because you did not foster in yourself an active, actively benevolent heart.  The Brothers Karamazov


Frederick Douglas
"Very well," thought I, "knowledge unfits a child to be a slave."


Norman Douglas
Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.
 
If you want to see what children can do, stop giving them things.
 

Collin Douma
Often brilliance is dismissed as rubbish because nobody really expects it to be there.
 

Arthur Conan Doyle
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Peter Drucker
Education is already grabbing a major chunk of America's gross national product. I believe that the U.S. now spends around $1 trillion on education and training. This number will increase rapidly, but the growth won't be in traditional schools, which currently take about 10% of the GNP (kindergarten through high school, 6%; colleges and universities, 4%). The growth will be in continuing adult education.
Davenport: What industry do you think has been affected the most by the information revolution?
Drucker: The biggest impact will be on knowledge industries such as education and medicine, which are in great need of increased productivity. The impact on education will be profound, but first there will have to be a critical mass of technology in the classroom. Soon we will have some sort of desktop-access machine --it is unlikely to be a regular PC --as standard equipment in classrooms. There are also revolutionary applications involving simulation in medicine and software for maintaining and repairing equipment in the military. Of course, some of these same capabilities are being used in businesses.
The following is the unabridged version of Erick Schonfeld's discussion with Peter Drucker. The interview, The Guru's Guru, first appeared in the November issue of Business 2.0 .
We can make the new technology available to the remotest village in the Amazon. The obstacles are, first, enormous resistance by teachers, who see themselves threatened. Secondly, it isn't true that you've support for education in every third world country. I worked hard in Colombia and helped found the Universidad del Valle in Cali. We had a very difficult time in those small coffee-growing towns because parents expected children to be at work in the fields at age 11.
In India that's a great problem. Moreover, schools are an equalizing force. That's a tremendous obstacle in Indian provinces like Orissa, say, where the upper castes would bitterly fight admission of lower-class children.
Judging by historical experience, the new online continuing education of the already well-educated will not replace traditional education. New channels of distribution are typically additions and complements rather than replacements. Television, for example, did not kill radio or magazines or books. The new medium, TV, walked off with much of the growth, but the other media continued to thrive and grow, too.
What is an important example of the Internet's impact?
The Internet eliminates distance. That is its impact. The elimination of distance began with the railroad in England in the 1820s. The impact of the railroad was greater than that of the Internet, and faster. The inventors of the railroad did not see its potential. They built short lines, Liverpool to Manchester. The first ones to see the importance were the Rothschilds, who built the first long-distance line, from Vienna to Prague. And when the Austrian chancellor went to the emperor, who hated the Rothschilds but had to give his consent to this plan, the emperor just laughed and said, "Thank God, at last they're going to lose their shirt. We already have a stagecoach that goes from Vienna to Prague three times a week, and it is always empty." That railroad was sold out from day one.
And so there is a misconception that size equals performance. During the Internet bubble, it was argued that because the Internet is important, it must be profitable. That does not follow. Whether the Internet will ever be profitable -- as a business or as an industry -- is doubtful. But its impact is unbelievably great. The same is true of the history of medicine.
There is a 12th-century German proverb: "Don't go near your prince unless he calls for you twice." You go ahead and do things. You don't ask for permission because that implies the other fellow can say no. Yes, you risk ending up in jail. You have to take that risk.


Louis Dudek  (Canadian poet) 
Humanists may not know the second law of thermodynamics, there are also scientists who think the Enlightenment began with Edison.  

Alexandre Dumas
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it. 


Isadora Duncan
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

Finley Peter Dunne
You can lade a man up to th' university, but ye can't make him think.


Maurice Duplessis  Canadian politician
Education is like alcohol; some people can't take it.

Will Durant (American teacher and philosopher, 1885-1981)
Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Marriage is not a relation between man and a woman, designed to legalize desire; it is a relationship between parents and children designed to preserve and strengthen the race.
We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

Ed Dussault
If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?

 
Bob Dylan
Replying to the Rolling Stone Magazine (Nov.22/01) interviewer's question about his reaction to the events of September 11. 
One of those Rudyard Kipling poems, 'Gentlemen-Rankers' comes to my mind: "We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth/ We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung / And the measure of our torture is the measure of our youth / God help us, for we knew the worst too young!"
If anything, my mind would go to young people at a time like this. That's really the only way to put it.
Interviewer: Do you see any hope for the situation we find ourselves in?
I don't really know what I could tell you. I don't consider myself an educator or an explainer . . . But it is time now for great men to come forward. . . . People will have to change their internal world.
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the dayshift.  (Subterranean Homesick Blues)

Joanne Feist Teacher
Greatness, whether in the classroom or in day-to-day living, is intentional. Success doesn't come at once, but over a lifetime. The outstanding teacher is aware of the little things in her students' lives. She recognizes a spark of inspiration and nurtures to it a flaming passion for learning. 


Francisco Ferrer:  (Author of The Modern School)
We must destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent. 

Paul Karl Feyerabend
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) English novelist, dramatist
Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

Shannon Fife
The persons hardest to convince that they're at the retirement age are children at bedtime.

Malcolm Forbes  1919 - 1990  Publisher of Forbes Magazine
The goal of education is to replace an empty mind with an open mind.
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

Henry Ford (1863-1947)
I well remember the best teacher I ever had. He walked three and three-quarter miles every day from his forty-acre farm to the schoolhouse.  He got forty dollars a month during the winter. On Saturdays, he worked in a cooper shop; and in the summer, he looked after his farm. That man, by the very nature of his life, could not teach what is useless. 
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.  The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.


Michele Forman, (2001 Teacher of the Year)
If anything concerns me, it's the oversimplification of something as complex as assessment. My fear is that learning is becoming standardized. Learning is idiosyncratic. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn't fit into bubbles.
Education seems to be in America the only commodity of which the customer tries to get as little he can for his money.
Teachers are people who start things they never see finished, and for which then never get thanks until it is too late.


E.M. Forster (1879 - 1970)
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.  

Anatole France (French Writer 1844 -1924)
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and steal bread.
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. 
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
Nine tenths of education is encouragement.


Anne Frank
Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

Anna Freud
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

Friedrich Froebel
Children are like tiny flowers; they are varied and need care, but each is beautiful alone and glorious when seen in the community of peers.
In answering the question What is the purpose of education?
I started at that time from the observation that man lives in a world of objects which influence him and which he wishes to influence, and so he must know these objects in their characteristics, their essence and their relation to one another and to mankind.
Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul.

Robert Frost (American poet 1874 - 1963) 
Two kinds [of teachers]: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just give a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.   
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
[Education is] Hanging around until you've caught on.
The best way out is always through.



Robert Fulghum  American Author All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten 1988
All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - look.  
Don't worry that your children never listen to you. Worry that they are always watching you.

R. Buckminster Fuller
What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
Every child is born a potential genius.

Sir William Haley
Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

James Hallmark American teacher
I had a professor who started every class with, "So what are you excited about?"

Margaret Halsey (American author and humorist, 1910- )
Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

Edith Hamilton (American educator and writer, 1867-1963)
So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.

Peter Harrington  ninth-grade geography teacher
One of the biggest challenges I have as a teacher is to show my students the power of perseverance. Students today seem to think that the easy way is the best way. I try to set pretty high standards. My curriculum is not easy. It demands that the student come prepared and be able to think through the subjects we study. When a student takes the time to prepare well, when they're persistent in their effort, they find satisfaction and a strengthened belief in their ability to take on more difficult assignments.

Sydney J Harris "Leaving the Surface"
The beauty of “spacing” children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with the older ones—which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.

Stephen Hawking
One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.

Maureen Hawkins
Before you were conceived I wanted you
Before you were born I loved you
Before you were here for an hour I would die for you
This is the miracle of life

Ian Hay (1876-1952) English writer
[Teaching is] the most responsible, the least advertised, the worst paid, and the most richly rewarded profession in the world.

S.I. Hayakawa
Good teachers never teach anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place. 
Mark Twain used to say that it was possible to learn too much from experience.  A cat, he said, that had squatted once on a hot stove lid would never sit down on a hot stove lid again.  The trouble was that it would never sit down on a cold one either.

Grace Hechinger
Parents think their children should keep their innocence as long as possible. The world doesn't work that way.

Robert A. Heinlein
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly which can -- and must -- be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a "perfect society" on any foundation other than "Women and children first!" is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly -- and no doubt will keep trying.

Suzanne Heller
Misery is when grown-ups don’t realize how miserable kids can feel.

Edward C. Helwick
An important personal quality for a teacher is that he care about humanity.

Dr. Henker
Stop trying to perfect your child, but keep trying to perfect your relationship with him.

Robert Henri  American artist
In the faces of children I have seen a look of wisdom and of kindness expressed with such ease and such certainty that I know it was the expression of the whole race.
Feel the dignity of a child, do not feel superior to him, for you are not.

Jules Henry  (Author of Culture Against Man)
The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern . . . for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic, "creative hours" of kindergarten to the most abstruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand.



Gilbert Highet 1906 - 1978  American Educator
Every teacher dislikes some pupils - the cheeky lipsticked adolescent girls, the sullen, hangdog youths, the cocky vulgar little comedians, how loathsome they can be, all the more so because they do it deliberately.

Adolf Hitler
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

Eric Hoffer
It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

Marjorie Holmes
What feeling is so nice as a child’s hand in yours? So small, so soft and warm, like a kitten huddling in the shelter of your clasp.

John Holt
People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have.
We destroy the love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A's on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean's lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else. (adapted)
Except in rare times of great stress or danger, there is no reason why we cannot say 'No' to children in just as kind a way as we say 'Yes'. Both are words. Both convey ideas which even tiny children are smart enough to grasp. One says, 'We don’t do it that way', the other says 'That’s the way we do it'. Most of the time, that is what children want to find out. Except when overcome by fatigue, curiosity, or excitement, they want to do it right, do as we do, fit in, take part.

Sidney Hook
Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods or techniques. The teacher is the kingpin of the educational system.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.

Joe Houldsworth
The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child.

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Harold S. Hulbert
Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.

Aldous Huxley
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Thomas H. Huxley
It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Kay S. Hymowitz Ready or Not
Americans simply do not want their children overly involved with them. In other cultures parents cite things like becoming a good spouse and parent, good citizenship, or kindness and sensitivity as their goals for their children. What do Americans want for their children? In every study, one stark answer predominates: independence.
Human beings fashion the childhood their culture needs.


Lee Iacocca
In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

Ivan Illich (Author of Deschooling Society)
School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 

Dean Inge  (English writer)
The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values. 

Robert G. Ingersoll
One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests.

Tatanka Iotanka
Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.

H. Jackson Brown
Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

Henry James
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life's underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure. Towards these ends I pledge my life's work. I will supply the children with tools and knowledge to overcome the obstacles. I will pass on the wisdom of my years and temper it with patience. I shall impact in each child the desire to fulfill his or her dream. I shall teach.

Jonathan James (Student aged 16 who hacked into computers at NASA and the Pentagon)
All of it was for fun and games, and they're putting me in jail for it.  I don't want that to happen again. I can find other stuff for fun.

William James (1842-1910)
Genius...means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Karl Jaspers
Today, for the first time there is a real unity of of mankind which consists in the fact that nothing can happen anywhere that does not concern all.


David Jeremiah
Kids today learn a lot about getting to the moon, but very little about getting to heaven.

Louis Johannot (Headmaster Institut Le Rosey  Switzerland)
The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children. 

Samuel Johnson (on the headmaster of Litchfield School)
He would beat us unmercifully . . . He would ask a boy a question, and if he did not answer him, he would beat him, and he would beat him without considering whether he had an opportunity of knowing how to answer it . . . Now sir, if a boy could answer every question, there would be no need of a master to teach him. 

Jonathan (High school student) 
I think every high school student should take an ethics course.  Lots of people don't have a clue about right and wrong. 

David Jones American Teacher
I was in a restaurant once when the assistant manager came up to me and said, "Mr. Jones! You taught me in eighth grade seven years ago. This is a little corny, but I want to show you something."
He pulled out of his wallet a picture of me, and said, "Whenever I need some inspiration, I look at your picture and remember the things you taught me about life."
That is what teaching is all about.

Michael Jordan  American basketball player
My mother is my root foundation. She planted the seed that I base my life on, and that is the belief that the ability to achieve starts in your mind.

Carl Jung  (1875 - 1961 Swiss psychologist)
An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.  The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. 
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

Henry Kaiser
Problems are just opportunities in work clothes.

Abraham Kaplan
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.  

Bel Kaufman (1911-
Good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.

Ellen Kay (1849-1926) American teacher.
At every step a child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Garret Keizer
Kids undergo transformations that make the metamorphoses in Ovid or the plagues in Exodus look mundane.

Helen Keller (1880-1968)
The highest result of education is tolerance.  
I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher [Annie Sullivan] who unfolded and developed them . . . She never since let pass an opportunity . . . to make my life sweet and useful.
A child's mind is like a shallow brook which ripples and dances merrily over the stony course of its education and reflects here a flower, there a bush, yonder a fleecy cloud . . .

John F. Kennedy 1917 - 1963
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
The human mind is our fundamental resource.
It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.

Robert F. Kennedy
Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.

Rose Kennedy
I looked on child rearing not only as work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.

Francis Keppel
Education is too important to be left solely to the educators.

Jean Kerr
The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.

Ellen Key
Fathers and mothers must bow their heads in the dust before the exalted nature of the child. Until they see that the word "child" is only another expression for the conception of majesty; until they feel that it is the future which in the form of a child sleeps in their arms, and history which plays at their feet, they will not understand that they have as little power or right to prescribe laws for this new being as they possess the power or might to lay down paths for the stars.
The Education of the Child
For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, but this means no assumed childishness, no condescending baby-talk that the child immediately sees through and deeply abhors. What it does mean is to be as entirely and simply taken up with the child as the child himself is absorbed by his life. The Century of the Child (1909)
The time will come in which the child will be looked upon as holy, even when the parents themselves have approached the mystery of life with profane feelings; a time in which all motherhood will be looked upon as holy, if it is caused by a deep emotion of love, and if it has called forth deep feelings of duty.

J. Robby Kidd (Quoting a taxi driver in New York)
If you don't have a college education, you sure have to use your brains. 

Henry Kissinger
In crisis, the most daring course is often the safest.  

Martin Luther King Jr.  1929 - 1968
Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.
Thank God for the maladjusted child.
If a man is called to be a street sweeper, should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

Ronald Knox
A baby is an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other.

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) English writer
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Senator Kohl, from the U.S. Senate Hearing: "Crisis in Math and Science Education."
There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products buy soaking marijuana in ever changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation? How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test?


Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards 1993)
When a teacher complains that students are "off task" - a favorite bit of educational jargon - the behaviorist will leap to the rescue with a program to get them back "on" again. The more reasonable response to this complaint is to ask, "What's the task?" Not surprisingly, this way of framing the problem meets with considerable resistance on the part of many educators. More than once I have been huffily informed that life isn't always interesting, and kids had better learn to deal with this fact. . . . Thus is the desire to control children, or the unwillingness to create a worthwhile curriculum, rationalized as being in the best interests of the students.

Jonathan Kozol (American author)
More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.
They [children] are strong in their faith in God, they believe in the decency of others, and they are not yet soiled by the knowledge that their country doesn't like them.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
All of our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America.

Karl Kraus
Education is a crutch with which the foolish attack the wise to prove that they are not idiots.

J. Krishnamurti  1895 - 1986 Indian philosopher
When you have that seed [education], and it is flowering here, then you will keep it going all your life. But if this doesn't operate, then the world will destroy you.  The world makes you what it wants you to be; a cunning animal . . .
The world is that way, deceptive, the deceiving politicians, the money-minded . . If you are not properly educated you'll just slip into it.  So what do you think is education? It is to help you fit into the mechanism o the present order, or disorder of things? Or do you think it should be something else?
Learning is the very essence of humility, learning from everything and from everybody. There is no hierarchy in learning.

Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) If You Don't Mind Me Saying (1964)
It is . . . sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.

Jess Lair
Children are not things to be molded, but are people to be unfolded.
Ann Landers
It isn't what a teenager knows that worries his parents. It's how he found out.

Wanda Landowska  (Polish musician 1879 - 1959)
The most beautiful thing in the world is, precisely, the conjunction of learning and inspiration. Oh the joy of discovery! 

Johann Kaspar Lavater
Beware of him who hates the laugh of a child.

Vernon Law
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.


Elizabeth Lawrence
There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.

Timothy Leary
We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Fran Lebowitz.
Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble, as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat. 

Robert E. Lee
The education of a man is never completed until he dies.

Ursula LeGuin
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.

John Lennon  British songwriter, musician
The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard.

George B. Leonard (Writer: Education and Ecstasy (1968)
Schools and colleges have until now (to recap briefly) served a society that needed reliable, predictable human components. Appropriately enough, they spent overwhelming amounts of time and energy ironing out those human impulses and capabilities which seemed errant. Since learning involves behavioral change, lifelong learning was the most errant of behaviors and was not to be countenanced. Educational institutions, therefore, were geared to stop learning. Perhaps half of all learning ability was squelched in the earliest elementary grades, where children found out that there exist predetermined and unyielding "right answers" for everything, that following instructions is what really counts and, most surprisingly, that the whole business of education is mostly dull and painful.

Eda J. Leshan
We are not asking our children to do their own best but to be the best. Education is in danger of becoming a religion based on fear; its doctrine is to compete. The majority of our children are being led to believe that they are doomed to failure in a world which has room only for those at the top.

Doris Lessing (b.1919)
. . . that is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Sam Levenson
Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn't poor.

C. S. Lewis 
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it.  They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modeling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have - I believe the English already use the phrase - "parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma - Beelzebub, what a useful word! - by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. -- C.S. Lewis, from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," 1959
T
homas Lickona
Children need limits with independence, roots, and wings.

Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot  (American teacher)
I don't think there's any way you could be in this business and not have an optimistic spirit. 
Learning is at its best when it is deadly serious and very playful at the same time.


Abraham Lincoln
Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we, as a people, can be engaged in . . . 
It is my pleasure that my children are free and happy, and unrestrained by parental tyranny. Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.

Robert Lindner  (Psychoanalyst )
Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be "socialized" -- which in the current semantic means to be regimented and made to conform.


Andrew Linzey
Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.


Arthur Lismer  (Canadian Artist)
If it moves, we can educate it.  If it is alive, we can keep it moving. 

John Locke (1632 - 1704)
Virtue . . it is the hard and valuable Part to be aim'd at in Education.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

John Lubbock  (English writer 1834 - 1913) 
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. 

Martin Luther
The prosperity of a country depends, not on the abundance of its revenues, nor on the strength of its fortifications, nor on the beauty of its public buildings; but it consists in the number of its cultivated citizens, in its men of education, enlightenment and character.  

Frank J Macchiarola  Schools Chancellor, NYC
If Chrysler had an assembly line in which the same number of cars got through as kids do in our school system, people would be scandalized.


Dr. Ken Magid
The real choice a human baby must make is whether to trust or mistrust other humans. This basic trust-versus-mistrust stage is the first building block upon which all later love relationships are formed.

Morris Mandel
Four magic words, "we can't afford it," should be a part of every child's education. A child who has never heard those words--or also has never been forced to abide by their meaning--has surely been cheated by his parents. As exercise strengthens the body, frugality strengthens the spirit. Without its occasional discipline, character suffers.

Rev. Mary Manin Morrissey
Listening is a high art of loving. Ask yourself, "When was the last time I really listened to my child? My parent? My brother or sister?" When someone is ready to share, three magic words amplify your connection, and they are: "Tell me more."

Horace Mann
The Common School is the greatest discovery ever made by man. 

Michael Garrett Marino
A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.

Don Marquis
If a child shows himself to be incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.

Harriet Martineau
What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable than teaching?

Groucho Marx
School was an unspeakable bore and the only thing that interested me was the teacher. The rest of my studies seemed pretty worthless. Algebra and geometry were tools of the devil, devised to make life miserable for small stupid boys.

Abraham Maslow
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965) Of Human Bondage, 1915
D'you call life a bad job? Never! We've had our ups and downs, we've had our struggles, we've always been poor, but it's been worth it, ay, worth it a hundred times I say when I look round at my children.

Guy de Maupassant
No sweeter, holier sound to heaven can float
Than childhood's laughter, or the free bird's note

Christa McAuliffe (1948-1986)
I touch the future. I teach.

Rosemary McKnight Third-Grade Teacher
An accomplished educator is not one who has spent the most time in the classroom or won the most awards. An accomplished educator is one who has made a difference in the live of the students. An accomplished educator helps students become better educated but also helps them become better people.

Mignon Mclaughlin
Likely as not, the child you can do the least with, will do the most to make you proud.


David McNally  Even Eagles Need a Push  1994
What is Life?
Life is a gift . . . accept it
Life is an adventure . . . dare it
Life is a mystery . . . unfold it
Life is a game . . . play it
Life is a struggle . . . face it
Life is beauty . . . praise it
Life is a puzzle . . . solve it
Life is opportunity . . . take it
Life is sorrowful . . . experience it
Life is a song . . . sing it
Life is . . . achieve it
Life is mission . . . fulfill it.


Margaret Mead (1901-1978) American anthropologist
Her motto: Be lazy, go crazy.
If they learn easily, they are penalized for being bored when they have nothing to do; if they excel in some outstanding way, they are penalized as being conspicuously better than the peer group. The culture tries to make the child with a gift into a one-sided person, to penalize him at every turn, to cause him trouble in making friends and to create conditions conducive to the development of a neurosis. Neither teachers, the parents of other children, nor the child peers will tolerate a Wunderkind.

My grandmother wanted me to have and education, so she kept me out of school. 
The ability to learn is older -- as it is also more widespread -- than is the ability to teach.
The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers.
If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon the how our children grow up today. There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing when we save our children, we save ourselves.


H.L. Mencken (American editor 1880 - 1956) 
A man who knows a subject thoroughly, so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it, and dreams it - this man can always teach it with success . .  . 
School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.

Karl A. Menninger
What is done to children, they will do to society.

John Stuart Mill
Persons of genius, it is true, are a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

Alice Duer Miller
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

Arthur Miller
The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress.
You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

Charles Mingus (late American jazz composer and pianist)
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird--that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity.

Gabriela Mistral (Chilean teacher 1899 - 1957) 
Let the radiance of my enthusiasms envelop the poor courtyard and the bare classroom.  Let my heart be a stronger column and my goodwill purer gold than the columns and gold of rich schools. 
Many things can wait. Children cannot.
Today their bones are being formed, their blood
is being made, their senses are being developed.
To them we cannot say "tomorrow."
Their name is today.

James A. Michener   American Author  
I doubt that I could be a teacher in a modern school, and for good reason. In my day parents and administrators both supported my efforts to be the best teacher possible; today it seems that teachers are not supported anymore, and I doubt that I could fight undefended. 

Alice Duer Miller
It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties.

Robert A. Millikan
Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that you ever meet. Interest and attention will insure to you an education.


John Milton
The child shows the man as morning shows the day.
Wilson Mizner (1876 - 1933)
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.



Ashley Montague (b. 1905)  (American anthropologist)

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

Michel de Montaigne (1553 - 1592)
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
 
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.
 
It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.

Marilyn Monroe
Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. drawing out, not the pumping in. 

Vaughan Monroe
It now costs more to amuse a child than it once did to educate his father.

Charlotte Montgomery
One of my children wrote in a third-grade piece on how her mother spent her time…. “one-half time on home, one-half time on outside things, one-half time writing.”


Maria Montessori (Italian physician and educator, 1870-1952)
A new education from birth onward must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the laws of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.
If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of a man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?
The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'
One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
[A school should be] a prepared environment in which the child set free from undue adult intervention, can live its life according to the laws of its development.
The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but also the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: The activity must lie in the phenomenon. We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. 
The world of education is like an island where people, cut off from the world, are prepared for life by exclusion from it.
The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.
We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait for a master.
Adults look upon a child as something empty that is to be filled through their own efforts, as something inert and helpless for which they must do everything, as something lacking an inner guide and in constant need of inner direction. . . . An adult who acts in this way, even though he may be convinced that he is filled with zeal, love, and a spirit of sacrifice on behalf of his child, unconsciously suppresses the development of the child's own personality.
Education is not something which the teacher does ... it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.
Our aim is not only to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core.
The training of the teacher who is to help life is something far more than the learning of ideas.  It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.
It is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers is more the spirit than the mechanical skill of the scientist; that is, the direction of the preparation should be toward the spirit rather than toward the mechanism.
The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.
The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child. 
Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.
It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.
Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.
The teacher's task is no small or easy one! He has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger, and he is not, like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus.
The first duty of an education is to stir up life, but leave it free to develop.
It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience.
Written language can be acquired more easily by children of four years than by those of six.  While children of six usually need at least two years to learn how to write children of four years learn this second language within a few months.
One who desires to be a teacher must have an interest in humanity that connects the observer more closely than that which joins the biologist or zoologist to nature.
192. The most urgent task facing educators is to come to know this unknown child and to free it from all entanglements.
These words reveal the child's inner needs: "Help me to do it alone."
Sometimes very small children in a proper environment develop a skill and exactness in their work that can only surprise us.
The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent or teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.   
Any child who is self-sufficient, who can tie his shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy and sense of achievement the image of human dignity, which is derived from a sense of independence.
The life of the spirit prepares the dynamic power for daily life, and, on its side, daily life encourages thought by means of ordinary work.
Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.
The most difficult thing to make clear to the new teacher is that because the child progresses, she must restrain herself and avoid giving directions, even if at first they are expected; all her faith must repose in his latent powers.
 
The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child.
We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction.
A felicitous environment that guides the children and offers them the means to exercise their own faculties permits the teacher to absent herself temporarily. The creation of such an environment is already the realization of great progress.
Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.
 
We must help the child to liberate himself from his defects without making him feel his weakness.
The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed.  He often suffers, not from too much work, but from work that is unworthy of him.
There is a part of a child's soul that has always been unknown but which must be known.  With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search, like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold.
The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is.
In their dealings with children adults do not become egotistic but egocentric.  They look upon everything pertaining to a child's soul from their own point of view and, consequently, their misapprehensions increase.
There is in the soul of a child an impenetrable secret that is gradually revealed as it develops.
The first essential for the child's development is concentration.  The child who concentrates is immensely happy.
"There is a part of a child's soul that has always been unknown but which must be known. With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold. This is what the adults must do who seeks the unknown factor that lies hidden in the depths of a child's soul. This is a labor in which all must share, without distinction of nation, race, or social standing since it means the bringing forth of an indispensable element for the moral progress of mankind."  (The Secret of Childhood,) 
If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence. It must initiate them into those kinds of activities which they can perform themselves and which keep them from being a burden to others because of their inabilities. We must help them to learn how to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down the stairs, to pick up fallen objects, to dress and undress, to wash themselves, to express their needs in a way that is clearly understood, and to attempt to satisfy their desires through their own efforts. All this is part of an education for independence."  (The Discovery of the Child,) 
"This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They thus carry out an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations."  (The Discovery of the Child,) 
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.


Joseph Morgenstern
Children are gleeful barbarians.


Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
The best way to learn is through the powerful force of rhythm.

Martin Mull
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.

Lewis Mumford  Transformations of Man 1956
So we stand on the brink of a new age: of an open world and of a self capable of playing its part in that larger sphere.
A day spent without sight and sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection is a poverty stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

H. H. Munro
But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school. The Baker's Dream

Ogden Nash
Children aren't happy without something to ignore, And that's what parents were created for.
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think their children are naive.

Maurice Nathanson  (American professor)
What a teacher doesn't say  . . . is a telling part off what a student hears.



Hilda Neatby
When we judge a man not by his car but by his conversation, not by his house but by his books, we may have a land fit for teachers to live in.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.


Florence Nightingale
"And so is the world put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts (which were meant, not for selfish gratification, but for the improvement of that world) to conventionality." 1852
"Heaven is neither a place nor a time." 1873
"You ask me why I do not write something. . . . I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results."

Dorothy Law Nolte
If a child lives with approval, he learns to live with himself.

Steve Nordby
Those who can do.
Those who can't teach.
Those who can't teach train teachers.
Those who can't train teachers write teacher training textbooks.
Those who can't write teacher training textbooks write state assessment tests.

Novalis
Where children are, there is the golden age.

Alden Nowlan
The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.

P.J O'Rourke
You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they are going.
Modern parents believe toilet training should be an easy and casual affair. Just let the child s*%# all over everything. This prepares him or her for a brilliant career as a talk show host. It used to be thought that children should act like "little adults." Like many things that used to be thought, this is true. In fact, now more than ever. Today's real adults are self-involved, impulsive, inarticulate, and spend as much time as possible out playing. They can't sit still, don't like to get dressed up, and hate every kind of activity that requires self-restraint. Adults are the children of today, and therefore children have to be adults because there's only so much room in the world for kids.


Susan Ohanian (Teacher and writer)
School administrators intone that "in order for learning to take place, there must be order in the classroom." That may be true, but I feel the emphasis is in the wrong place. In order for learning to take place, there should be something worth learning.
Teachers consist of equal parts of perspiration, inspiration and resignation. 


George Orwell 'Riding Down from Bangor', 1946
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

William Osler (1849-1919) Canadian physician
No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

Wizard of Oz
"I can't give you a brain, but I can give you a diploma"

Thomas Paine
Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true.

Dorothy Parker
The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.


Dolly Parton
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

Louis Pasteur
When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments: tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.

Cy N. Peace
Back in the old days it was the student rather than the teacher who had to explain why they could not read.  

Joseph Chilton Pearce
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.

Vito Perrone  (American Teacher)
Teaching provides a way to stay young at heart, to maintain a lifetime of active learning . . It is in every respect a profession of hope. 

Candace B. Pert
The public is being misinformed about the precision of these selective serotonin-uptake inhibitors when the medical profession oversimplifies their action in the brain and ignores the body as if it exists merely to carry the head around! In short, these molecules of emotion regulate every aspect of our physiology. A new paradigm has evolved, with implications that life-style changes such as diet and exercise can offer profound, safe and natural mood elevation.

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi  [1746 - 1827]
Harmony cannot be brought about by unity, but unity must be attained by harmony.
I wish to wrest education from the outworn order of doddering old teaching hacks as well as from the new-fangled order of cheap, artificial teaching tricks, and entrust it to the eternal powers of nature herself, to the light which God has kindled and kept alive in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interests of parents who desire their children grow up in favour with God and with men. (Pestalozzi quoted in Silber 1965: 134)

William H. Kilpatrick has summarized six principles that run through Pestalozzi's efforts around schooling.
1.       Personality is sacred. This constitutes the 'inner dignity of each individual for the young as truly as for the adult.
2.       As 'a little seed... contains the design of the tree', so in each child is the promise of his potentiality. 'The educator only takes care that no untoward influence shall disturb nature's march of developments'.
3.       Love of those we would educate is 'the sole and everlasting foundation' in which to work. 'Without love, neither the physical not the intellectual powers will develop naturally'. So kindness ruled in Pestalozzi's schools: he abolished flogging - much to the amazement of outsiders.
4.       To get rid of the 'verbosity' of meaningless words Pestalozzi developed his doctrine of Anschauung - direct concrete observation, often inadequately called 'sense perception' or 'object lessons'. No word was to be used for any purpose until adequate Anschauung had preceded. The thing or distinction must be felt or observed in the concrete. Pestalozzi's followers developed various sayings from this: from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex, from the concrete to the abstract.
5.       To perfect the perception got by the Anschauung the thing that must be named, an appropriate action must follow. 'A man learns by action... have done with [mere] words!' 'Life shapes us and the life that shapes us is not a matter of words but action'.
6.       Out of this demand for action came an emphasis on repetition - not blind repetition, but repetition of action following the Anschauung.


William H. Kilpatrick in his introduction to Heinrich Pestalozzi (1951) The Education of Man - Aphorisms, New York: Philosophical Library.
Petronious (Roman writer)
Education is a treasure, and culture never dies.

Beryl Pfizer
If you treat children like grown-ups, they'll probably behave just as badly as the rest of us.

Emo Philips
Whatever happened to the good ole days, when children worked in factories?

Wendell Philips [1811 - 1884]
Responsibility educates.
The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.

Philo (Roman politician 4th century B.C.)
Learning is by nature curiosity . . prying into everything, reluctant to leave anything, material or immaterial, unexplained. 

Jean Piaget
The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done -- men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.

Plato
[Because] knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold in the mind...then do not use compulsion but let early education be a sort of ??????
Those having torches will pass them on to others.
Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.
Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.
Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence.
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
THE REPUBLIC:  Chapter XXV  
....we must conclude that education is not what it is said to be by some, who profess to put knowledge into a soul which does not possess it, as if they could put sight into blind eyes.
On the contrary, our own account signifies that the soul of every man does possess the power of learning the truth and the organ to see it with; and that, just as one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can bear to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the Good. Hence, there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing, the conversion of the soul, in the readiest way; not to put the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be. 
Translation by Francis M. Cornford.  Oxford University Press
Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.


Edgar Allen Poe
The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.


John Plomp
You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

Plutarch ? - 120
A good education and sound upbringing up is of the first, middle, and last importance; and I declare to be the most instrumental and conducive to virtue and happiness . . . education is of all our advantages the only one immortal and diving.

Robert Pollok
Children are living jewels dropped unsustained from heaven.

Mary Pettibone Poole, A Glass Eye at a Keyhole, 1938
To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains.

Neil Postman
[T]he most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to provide them with a sense of coherence in their studies; that is, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn . . . [In modern secular education, the] curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects.

Beatrix Potter
Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.

Ron Powers  Link to full quote
"We must face the fact that having ceased to exploit children as laborers, we now exploit them as consumers."

J.B. Priestly
To show a child what has once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection. This is happiness."
As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that - thank Heaven - nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

Professor Brian Quinn
Yes, the lectures are optional. Graduation is also optional.


Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618)
The useful type of successful teacher is one whose main interest is the children, not the subject.

R.I. Rees
Formal education is but an incident in the lifetime of an individual. Most of us who have given the subject any study have come to realize that education is a continuous process ending only when ambition comes to a halt.

Paul Reiser   Babyhood
People often ask me, "What's the difference between couplehood and babyhood?" In a word? Moisture. Everything in my life is now more moist. Between your spittle, your diapers, your spit-up and drool, you got your baby food, your wipes, your formula, your leaky bottles, sweaty baby backs, and numerous other untraceable sources--all creating an ever-present moistness in my life, which heretofore was mainly dry.


Malvina Reynolds  song "Little Boxes"
And they all play on the golf course,
and drink their martini's dry
And they all have pretty children,
and the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp,
and then to the university,
Where they put them all in boxes,
and they all come out the same.


Beah Richards
Both class and race survive education, and neither should. What is education then? If it doesn't help a human being to recognize that humanity is humanity, what is it for? So you can make a bigger salary than other people?


Adam Robinson (Co-founder of The Princeton Review)
Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be "taught" if they are to learn. . . . Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I'm angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own.

Carl Rogers (U.S. psychologist 1902 - )
I think my deepest criticism of the educational system at that period [junior high and high school], and that also applies to other periods, is that it's all based upon a distrust of the student. Don't trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not.

Will Rogers (American humorist 1879 - 1935) 
You must never tell a thing. You must illustrate it. We learn through the eye and not through the noggin.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.  

Jim Rohn
Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

Andy Rooney (American journalist b. 1919)  
Good teachers are usually a little crazy.
Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.

Eleanor Roosevelt former First Lady of the U.S.
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. 
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (American president 1882-1945)
We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

Theodore Roosevelt  (American president
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.


Jean Jacques Rousseau
To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.
The training of children is a profession, where we must know how to waste time in order to save it.
We are born weak, we need strength; helpless, we need aid; foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.


John Ruskin (English art critic 1819 - 1900) 
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece. 
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.

Rita Rudner
My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.

Lee Rudolph
No one wants a good education. Everyone wants a good degree.

Bertrand Russell
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race."


Antonne de Saint-Exupery "The Little Prince"
Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.  

Eloise Salholz  (in Newsweek )
Living up to basic ethical standards in the classroom - discipline, tolerance, honesty - is one of the most important ways children learn how to function in society at large. 

J. D. Salinger
Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.

Carl Sandburg
There is only one child in the world; and that child's name is ALL CHILDREN.


May Sarton
I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of  being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.

Virginia Satir
Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible--the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nuturing family.

Robert C. Savage
Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated.

Arthur Schopenhaer
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.


William H. Schubert.  (Former John Dewey Society President)
Education cannot be for students in any authentic way, if it is not of and by them.

Charles Schulz (American cartoonist 1922-2001)
A good education is the next best thing to a pushy mother.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.
Example is not the main thing in influencing others; It is the only thing.
Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and
learn again to exercise his will—his personal responsibility.
                                                                                       
The idea that men should ever be favored by being free from the responsibilities of self-sacrifice as men for men is foreign to the ethic of reverence for life. It requires that in some way or other and in something or other we should all live as men for men. Therefore, search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity.
Whatever you have received more than others in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a pleasant childhood, in harmonious conditions of home life, all this you must not take to yourself as a matter of course. You must pay a price for it. You must render in return an unusually great sacrifice of your life for other life.
The African sun is shining through the coffee bushes into the dark shed, but we black and white sit side by side and feel that we experience the meaning of the words: "And all ye are brethren."
Late on the third day, at the very moment when at sunset we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought: "Reverence for Life."
The iron door had yielded: The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side!
Thus, to me, ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principal of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.


Angela Schwindth
While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.

Pete Seeger
Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.

Jerry Seinfeld
There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B.C. - 65 A.D.) Roman statesman
Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.
As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit.
I delight in learning so that I can teach.

Dr. Seuss
Adults are obsolete children.

William Shakespeare (As You Like It)
The whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. 
How poor are they that have not patience Othello, Act ii, Sc.3
I'll be as patient as a gentle stream  Two G of V, Act ii, Sc.6
Where is truth if there is no self-trust? Rape of Lucrece
We, ignorant of ourselves, beg often our own harms, which the wise powers deny us for our good  Ant & Cleo, Act ii, Sc.1
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school. (King Henry VI)
We are such stuff as dreams are made on... The Tempest, IV:1
Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it? M for M, Act ii, Sc.2
They that have the power to hurt, and will do none; they rightly do inherit heaven's graces"  Sonnet 94
In nature there's no blemish but the mind; none can be called deform'd but the unkind"  Twelfth N, Act iii, Sc.4
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt  M for M, Act i, Sc.5


George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright 1856-1950)
Honest education is dangerous to tyranny and privilege: the systems like the capitalist system, kept in vogue by popular ignorance, churches which depend on it for priestly authority, privileged classes, and ambitious conquerors and dictators who have to instill royalist idolatry and romantic hero-worship, all use both ignorance and education as underpinning for general faith in themselves as rulers. 
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages.
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
Parents and guardians are so worried by children and so anxious to get rid of them that anyone who is willing to take them off their hands is welcomed and whitewashed.
I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead of a day boy at an Irish one, I might have had to add to these, deeper shames still.
My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt. 
Now nobody knows the way a child should go. All the ways discovered so far lead to the horrors of our existing civilizations, described quite justifiably by Ruskin as heaps of agonizing human maggots, struggling with one another for scraps of food.
The school remains what it was in my boyhood, because its real object remains what it was. And that object, I repeat, is to keep the children out of mischief: mischief meaning for the most part worrying the grown-ups.
What is a child? An experiment. A fresh attempt to produce the just man made perfect: that is, to make humanity divine.




Hu Shih (Chinese writer, 1891-1962)
The underlying sickness of human life is an unwillingness to look with open eyes at the condition of the world.


William Gilmore Simms (American writer 1806 - 1870)
 . . . the great secret of education is to open all the ears - which we call senses - of a man, so that he can drink in all the harmonies of that world of music, which we commonly call life. 

Red Skelton
Any kid will run any errand for you, if you ask at bedtime.

B.F. Skinner (American behavioral psychologist, 1904-1990)
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
Was putting a man on the moon actually easier than improving education in our public schools?
Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

Carson Smith McCullers
The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or, again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.


Socrates
The child is not a vessel to be filled but a flame to be kindled.
Children nowadays love luxury, have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for elders . .
No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. . . . No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory. 
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be... those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes... those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober -- minded men.
Could I climb to the highest place in Athens, I would lift my voice and proclaim, "Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth and take so little care of your children to whom one day you must relinquish it all.  
Wisdom begins in wonder.



Alexander Solzhenitsyn
It seemed to me the supreme heartbreaking happiness to enter a classroom . . . and start a lesson with the mysterious air of one about the unfold wonders.

Susan Sontag (American writer b. 1933)
The intellectual life is about feelings. It's a state of being active with your consciousness responding to your environment. 

Muriel Sparks (b.1918)
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

Herbert Spencer
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)
Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.

Viola Spolin (teacher)
First teach a person to the point of his limitations and then - pfft! - break the limitation.

Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

William Stafford
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

Joseph Stalin
Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. 

Luther Standing Bear (Sioux writer, 1868-1939)
White men seem to have difficulty in realizing that people who live differently from themselves still might be traveling the upward and progressive road of life.
Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the old world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American.
 
E.W. Steacie  (Scientist)
One of the most disturbing slogans of the day is "education is everybody's business."  That everyone should support education is, of course, undeniable; the theory that everyone should regard himself as an expert in education is, however, and unfortunate one. 

John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)
She left her signature on us, the literature of the teacher who writes on minds. I have had many teachers who told me soon-forgotten facts but only three who created in me a new thing, a new attitude, a new hunger. I suppose that to a large extent I am the unsigned manuscript of that high school teacher. What deathless power lies in the hand of such a person.

Henry Lewis Stimson ( U.S. Secretary of State 1867–1950)
The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.


Harriet Beecher Stowe
One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.
When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
Everyone confesses that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us; but most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.


Annie Sullivan (1866-1936) Teacher of the deaf
My heart is singing for joy this morning. A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!
People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
Children need guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Jonathan Swift
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Charles Swindoll  "The Strong Family"
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.

Rabindranath Tagore
God respects me when I work,
but he loves me when I sing.
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.

Sara Teasedale
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstacy
Give all you have been, or could be.
It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.

Lauri Tellier
I learned long ago that middle class single parenthood life seldom provides dramatic opportunities for excitement and adventure, so my philosophy is: Find the magic in the mundane. There is some to be found every day if you look for it. Children have a direct line to Magic Central. I just have to listen to my daughter when I need a dose.

Sir William Temple
The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child's home.

Henry David Thoreau
What does education often do?  It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free meandering brook.
Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit
Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.   Walden

Alvin Toffler (American futurist)
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Lily Tomlin
We're all in this alone.

Leo Tolstoy
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Arnold J. Toynbee  (Historian)
There is going to be a race between mass self-education and mass self-destruction.  "Conditions of Survival" Saturday Review August 1964
Lifelong part-time education is the surest way of raising the intellectual and moral level of the masses. 
The aim of education is, or should be to teach people to educate themselves. 

P. L. Travers
When I was a child, love to me was what the sea is to a fish: something you swim in while you are going about the important affairs of life.

Harry S. Truman (American president 1884-1972)
I always tell students that it is what you learn after you know it all that counts.
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Desmond Tutu
Children are a wonderful gift . . . They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.

Mark Twain (1835–1910) (U.S. author)
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards. Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897)
I never let my schooling interfere with my education.
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in 7 years.
Humor must professedly teach an it must mot professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. 
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great.
It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others - and less trouble.
Always obey your parents - when they are present. 

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly


John Updike  (U.S. author)
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents.  So they provided jails called schools equipped with tortures called an education. 
School is where you go between when your parent's can't take you and industry can't take you.  


Peter Ustinov (b. 1921) English actor
. . . what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn.
Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.



Ann Van Tassells
Children are like sponges; they absorb all your strength and leave you limp... But give them a squeeze and you get it all back.

Ruth Vaughn
Parenthood is a partnership with God... you are working with the creator of the universe in shaping human character and determining destiny.

R. Verdi
Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don't know.

Vincent Van Gogh
I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.

Voltaire (French satirist, essayist, and historian, 1694-1778)
Every man is guilty of the good he didn't do.

Prince Otto von Bismarck
You can do anything with children if you only play with them.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe  [1749 - 1832]
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.

Kurt Vonnegut
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Peter de Vries
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.

L. Vygotsky
Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.

Charles Wadsworth
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.

Waheenee (Hidatsa)
Sometimes in the evening I sit, looking out on the big Missouri. The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water. In the shadows I seem again to see our Indian village, with smoke curling upward from the earth lodges, and in the river's roar I hear the yells of warriors, and the laughter of little children as of old. It is but an old woman's dream. Then I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come into my eyes. Our Indian life, I know, is gone forever.

Lou Ann Walker (American author and sign language interpreter, 1952- )
Theories and goals of education don't mean a whit if you don't consider your students to be human beings.

Booker T. Washington  My Larger Education (1911)
The majority of successful men are persons who have had difficulties to overcome, problems to master; and in overcoming those difficulties and mastering those problems, they have gained strength of mind and a clearness of vision that few people who have had a life of ease have been able to attain. 
Few thing help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.


Denzel Washington
Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.


Bill Watterson  Calvin and Hobbes
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.

John Watson 1901
At present the position of the Public School and High School teacher is unfortunate.  His services are undervalued; he is underpaid; his work is monotonous; and, if he is a man who has a high ideal of education, his heart is almost broken by the unpromising material with which has often to deal, and the vexatious opposition he meets with from the low aims of his pupils, the irrational prejudices of their parents, and the often unwise interferences of the Board of which he is the servant.   

Evelyn Waugh
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. 

Joseph Wax (adapted)
One must marvel at the intellectual quality of a teacher who can't understand why children assault one another in the hallway, playground, and city street, when in the classroom the highest accolades are reserved for those who have beaten their peers. In many subtle and some not so subtle ways, teachers demonstrate that what children learn means much less than that they triumph over their classmates. Is this not assault? Classroom defeat is only the pebble that creates widening ripples of hostility. It is self-perpetuating. It is reinforced by peer censure, parental disapproval, and loss of self-concept. If the classroom is a model, and if that classroom models competition, assault in the hallways should surprise no one.

Claire Weeks
If our education had included training to bear unpleasantness and to let the first shock pass until we could think more calmly, many an unbearable situation would become manageable, and many a nervous illness avoided. There is proverb expressing this. It says, trouble is a tunnel thorough which we pass and not a brick wall against which we must break our head.

Simone Weil
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

H.G. Wells
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  
Eudora Welty (b. 1909 American writer)
Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

Mae West
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
When women go wrong, men go right after them.

E.B. White
"Do you think you can maintain discipline?" asked the Superintendent. "Of course I can," replied Stuart. "I'll make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself."  Stuart Little
 

Alfred North Whitehead (Mathematician and philosopher, 1861 - 1947)
Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
Students are alive, and the purpose of education is to stimulate and guide their self-development. It follow as a corollary from this premise that teachers should also be alive with living thoughts.
There is only one subject matter for education, and that is life in all of its manifestations.
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, "It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters."
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas" -- that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.


Dr Anthony P Whitman
Children spell "love," T-I-M-E."
As parents we never stand so tall as when we stoop to help our children.

Walt Whitman
There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
There was a child went forth everyday, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day... or for many years or stretching cycles of years...  There Was a Child Went Forth, in Leaves of Grass


Oscar Wilde
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound.  Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produce no effect whatsoever.  It it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.   
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.  
I may have said the same thing before... But my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time, they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Few parents nowadays, pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.


Mary J. Wilson  (Schoolteacher quoted in Newsweek)
I'm never going to be a movie star. But then, in all probability, Liz Taylor is never going to teach first and second grade. 

Forest Witcraft
A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.

Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Woodrow Wilson  U.S. President
We have to teach the children we have
Not the children we used to have
Not the children we want to have
Not the children we dream to have.  

Carter G. Woodson (English novelist, 1759-1797)
The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think and do for himself.
What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
For me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.
Do you lead your students to the water and make them drink or do you try harder to make them thirsty? 

William Wordsworth
The child is father of the man.

Frank Lloyd Wright
To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, THAT is to have be educated in the knowledge of simplicity.

Steven Wright
Babies don't need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach... it pisses me off! I'll go over to a little baby and say "What are you doing here? You haven't worked a day in your life!
My friend has a baby. I'm writing down all the noises the baby makes so later I can ask him what he meant.  

Marian Wright Edelman
We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.

Malcolm X
Without education, you're not going anywhere in this world.
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

St. Francis Xavier
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.

Neil Young  songwriter
I am a child
I last a while.
You can't conceive
Of the pleasure in my smile.

Lin Yutang
No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.

Zig Ziglar
Kids go where there is excitement. They stay where there is love























There is pamphlet http://hospitalitybusiness.broad.msu.edu/files/2011/09/Smr2008-newsletter.pdf which contains the following words of wisdom by the legendary President of Michigan State, John Hannah, back in 1956, offered his definition of “Education.” We reprint it here from the archives of Wall of Fame Class of Founders member Ernie Renaud (BA ’57) for its timeless applicability, especially to the mission we live in The School. Please keep in mind that the male references are not meant to be exclusionary. In this case, “he” should be read “he or she” and “man” should be read “man or woman.” Times have certainly changed since 1956.

“In the final analysis, we believe that an educated man in a democracy is one who is trained and conditioned to be an effective citizen. He need not necessarily be a man who has attained great wealth, or professional distinction, or high public office.
He may not be known far beyond the borders of his own community. But he will have been educated to contribute to society ECONOMICALLY to the limits of his creative and productive skills.

He will have been educated to contribute SOCIALLY by his understanding of the world around him and his tolerance for the rights and opinions of others.
He will have been educated to contribute MORALLY by his acceptance and observance of fundamental values and his dedication to quality.
And he will have been educated to contribute POLITICALLY by his reasoned, thinking approach to political issues, his rejection of demagogic appeals, and his willingness and ability to lead or to follow with equal intelligence. We do not think so much of graduating restaurant managers or teachers or stewards or greeters as of graduating educated men and women, trained to be effective citizens of our democracy—men and women ready and willing to assume the duties of leadership in a nation crying for intelligent direction and guidance in a world full of confusion and insecurity and doubt and second raters and just get-by-ers”.

Then this is a book  I found very useful for teachers titled ‘The Best Advice Ever for Teachers’ by Charles McGuire and Diana  Abitz 


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