Here are some great quotes on education, teaching, and learning.
Thoughts of Great Teachers and Learners
Howard Gardner
* "If Confucius can serve as the Patron Saint of Chinese
education, let me propose Socrates as his equivalent in a Western
educational context - a Socrates who is never content with the initial
superficial response, but is always probing for finer distinctions,
clearer examples, a more profound form of knowing. Our concept of
knowledge has changed since classical times, but Socrates has provided
us with a timeless educational goal - ever deeper understanding."
Socrates
* "There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance."
Plato
* "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in
a year of conversation."
Plato
* "The object of education is to teach us love of beauty."
Aristotle
* "The educated differ from the uneducated, as the living from the dead."
Aristotle
* Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
* Pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.
Aristotle
* It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a
thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
* All men by nature desire knowledge.
* We cannot learn without pain.
* We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Rousseau
* "Plants are shaped by cultivation and men by education. ..
Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are
grown is given us by education."
Brigham Young
* Education is the ability to think clearly, act well in the world
of work and to appreciate life.
Maria Montessori
* "If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the
children, for the children are the makers of men."
Henry Adams
* A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Josef Albers
* Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving
of right answers.
John Dewey
* The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.
* One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure
suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
John Dewey
* Since there is no single set of abilities running throughout
human nature, there is no single curriculum which all should undergo.
Rather, the schools should teach everything that anyone is interested
in learning.
John Dewey
* Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's
knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed
earlier.
Albert Einstein
* It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative
expression and knowledge.
* Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simplier.
Albert Einstein
* "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern
methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy
curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from
stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to
wrack & ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that
the enjoyment of seeing & searching can be promoted by means of
coercion & a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would
be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness,
if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to
devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food,
handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly."
Albert Einstein
* Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another,
it is the only means.
William Glasser
* Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.
B.F. Skinner
* Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is
nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive
conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of
formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or
enjoyable later in a student'slife.
John Holt
* "There is no difference between living and learning . . . it is
impossible and misleading and harmful to think of them as being
separate. Teaching is human communication and like all communication,
elusive and difficult...we must be wary of the feeling that we know
what we are doing in class. When we are most sure of what we are
doing, we may be closest to being a bore."
John Goodland
* "As one high school student put succinctly, "We are birds in a
cage. The door opens but there is a cat outside"
John Roueche
* Teachers who cannot keep students involved and excited for
several hours in the classroom should not be there.
Stephen Brookfield
* The best learners... often make the worst teachers. They are, in
a very real sense, perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what
it must be like to struggle to learn something that comes so naturally
to them.
Stephen Brookfield
* We teach what we like to learn and the reason many people go
into teaching is vicariously to reexperience the primary joy
experienced the first time they learned something they loved.
John Updike
* The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were
an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called
school, equipped with tortures called education.
Howard Gardner
* "We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of
understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get
kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots
of different ways and apply it."
Howard Gardner
* "I have become one of the most insistent critics of such tests,
feeling that, whatever they successfully assess, they miss much; that
they often fail to pick up the most important human capacities and
attributes; they favor the glib and the conventional rather than the
profound or the creative; and that people who do not understand these
instruments attribute to them much more merit than they actually
warrant."
Howard Gardner
* "In my view, if we are to encompass adequately the realm of
human cognition, it is necessary to include a far wider and more
universal set of competences than has ordinarily been considered. And
it is necessary to remain open to the possibility that many - if not
most - of these competences do not lend themselves to measurement by
standard verbal methods, which rely very heavily on a blend of logic
and linguistic abilities"
Howard Gardner
* We should use kids' positive states to draw them into learning in the
domains where they can develop competencies....You learn at your
best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure from
being engaged in.
