Seventy-Four

The business of education is not to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences, but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any, when they shall apply themselves to it. – John Locke

Seventy-Three

The teacher should love his children better than his State or his Church; otherwise he is not an ideal teacher. – Bertrand Russell

I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son, and I don't think I should say more than this. – Thomas Wolfe

Seventy-Two

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain,
With grammar, and nonsense, and learning,
Good liquor, I stoutly maintain,
Gives genius a better discerning.
– Oliver Goldsmith

Seventy-One

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

The schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
– Will Rogers

Seventy

To teach is to learn twice. – Joseph Joubert

The saying "He who teaches others, teaches himself" is very true, not only because constant repetition impresses a fact indelibly on the mind, but because the process of teaching itself gives a deeper insight into the subject taught. – John Amos Comenius

Sixty-Nine

We have learnt that nothing is simple and rational except what we ourselves have invented; that God thinks in terms neither of Euclid nor of Riemann; that science has "explained" nothing; that the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. – Aldous Huxley

Sixty-Eight

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. – Bill Gates

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. – Bernard Iddings

Sixty-Seven

I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.... But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move.... Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience. – John Dewey

Sixty-Six

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.
– Chinese proverb

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.
– Henry Steele Commager

Sixty-Five

To the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name knowledge. – Ambrose Bierce

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. – Saul Bellow

Sixty-Four

Children learn to care by experiencing good care. They come to know the blessings of gentleness, or sympathy, of patience and kindness, of support and backing first through the way in which they themselves are treated. – James L. Hymes, Jr.

Sixty-Three

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. – Douglas Adams

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.
– Barbara Tuchman

Sixty-Two

Art is humanity's most essential, most universal language. It is not a frill, but a necessary part of communication. The quality of civilization can be measured through its music, dance, drama, architecture, visual art, and literature. We must give our children knowledge and understanding of civilization's most profound works. – Ernest L. Boyer

Sixty-One

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. – G. K. Chesterton

Education is the transmission of civilization.
– Ariel and Will Durant

Sixty

We must view young people not as empty bottles to be filled, but as candles to be lit. – Robert H. Shaffer

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.
– William Arthur Ward

Fifty-Nine

A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, and understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing. – Laurent A. Daloz

Fifty-Eight

A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism. – Louis A. Berman

The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fifty-Seven

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. – Will Durant

Fifty-Six

Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. – Sidney Hook

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.– Carl Jung

Fifty-Five

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
– Chinese proverb

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results. – John Dewey

Fifty-Four

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities have been decayed and demolished?– Francis Bacon

Fifty-Three

Education: a debt due from present to future generations.
– George Peabody

Whoso neglects learning in his youth,
Loses the past and is dead for the future.
– Euripides

Fifty-Two

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning. – Carl Rogers

Fifty-One

Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.
– W. Edwards Deming

Surely, therefore, the very nature and needs of the contemporary world make the teacher an indispensable member of society.
– Calvin O. Davis

Fifty

A good teacher is one who says something you won't understand until ten years later.– Julius Lester

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
– W. H. Auden

Forty-Nine

This is the road I have tried to tried to follow as a teacher: living my convictions; being open to the process of knowing and sensitive to the experience of teaching as an art; being pushed forward by the challenges that prevent me from bureaucratizing my practice; accepting my limitations, yet always conscious of the necessary effort to overcome them and aware that I cannot hide them because to do so would be a failure to respect both my students and myself as a teacher. – Paulo Freire

Forty-Eight

The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life – of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action - in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle. – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. – Benjamin Jowett

Forty-Seven

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.– G. K. Chesterton

One of the chief objects of education should be to widen the windows through which we view the world. – Arnold Glasgow

Forty-Six

Part of a teacher's success depends on personality, and the common denominator in the personality of good teachers is their ability to stimulate students to work on problems when the teacher is not there. The teacher then checks the ability of the student to think rather than regurgitate facts. – J. Willis Hurst

Forty-Five

Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.
– Horace Mann

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.– Franklin P. Jones

Forty-Four

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

To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.
– Frederick Douglass

Forty-Three

The work of a teacher – exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never the same – is as its heart, an intellectual and ethical enterprise. Teaching is the vocation of vocations, a calling that shepherds a multitude of other callings. It is an activity that is intensely practical and yet transcendent, brutally matter-of-fact, and yet fundamentally a creative act. Teaching begins in challenge and is never far from mystery. – William Ayres

Forty-Two

Knowledge is power and enthusiasm pulls the switch.
– Steve Droke

Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power.
– Barbara Jordan

Forty-One

Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible. – Robert Maynard Hutchins

We are rarely able to interact only with folks like ourselves, who think as we do. No matter how much some of us deny this reality and long for the safety and familiarity of sameness, inclusive ways of knowing and living offer us the only true way to emancipate ourselves from the divisions that limit our minds and imaginations. – bell hooks

Forty

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. – Jean Piaget

Thirty-Nine

As a business education teacher, my students often ask me if what they are learning will make them wealthy. I smile and say, No, but it will make you RICH by having Responsibility, Integrity, Character, and Honesty. – Joe Ward

Thirty-Eight

Teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability. – Parker Palmer

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide. – Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Thirty-Seven

A good teacher is one who helps you become who you feel yourself to be. – Julius Lester

Good teachers never teach anything. What they do is create the conditions under which learning takes place. – S. I. Hayakawa

Thirty-Six

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 have changed. – Anne Sullivan

Any teacher can take a child to the classroom, but not every teacher can make him learn. He will not work joyously unless he feels that liberty is his, whether he is busy or at rest; he must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way bravely through a dull routine of textbooks.
– Helen Keller

Thirty-Five

Do not train boys to learning by fear and harshness, but lead them by what amuses them, so they may better discover the bent of their minds. – Socrates

You must train the children to their studies in a playful manner, and without any air of constraint, with the further object of discerning more readily the natural bent of their respective characters. – Plato

Thirty-Four

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.
– Marian Wright Edelman

If you don't like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.
– Marian Wright Edelman

Thirty-Three

She used to be a schoolteacher but she has no class now.
– Fred Allen

I am not young enough to know everything. – Oscar Wilde

Thirty-Two

Great oaks from little acorns grow. – Latin proverb

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. – Hodding Carter

Thirty-One

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape – not from our own time, for we are bound by that – but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. – T. S. Eliot

A liberal education… frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.
– Robert Maynard Hutchins

Thirty

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.
– George Ade

Twenty-Nine

This is no argument against teaching manners to the young. On the contrary, it is a fine old tradition that ought to be resurrected from its current mothballs and put to work... In fact, children are much more comfortable when they know the guide rules for handling the social amenities. – Leontine Young

Twenty-Eight

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 may be engaged in.
– Abraham Lincoln

Education does not mean a college education. The author of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural could hardly be called uneducated. – Bergen Evans

Twenty-Seven

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. – Clay P. Bedford

The job of a teacher is to excite in the young a boundless sense of curiosity about life, so that the growing child shall come to apprehend it with an excitement tempered by awe and wonder.
– John Garrett

Twenty-Six

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is a man who has so much as to be out of danger? – Thomas Henry Huxley

A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal. – William Allen White

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad. – Bob Edwards

A little learning, indeed may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. – Frederick Douglass

Twenty-Five

The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values.
– William R. Inge

The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
– Mohammed

Twenty-Four

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.
– Aristotle

Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. – Abigail Adams

Twenty-Three

To ask a question may bring a moment’s shame, but not to ask and remain ignorant is a lifetime of shame. – Geoffrey Moss

There are no foolish questions, and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions. – Charles P. Steinmetz

Twenty-Two

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
– William Arthur Ward

Good teachers learn from their mistakes. Great teachers learn from other's mistakes.– Reed Markham

Twenty-One

Modern cynics and skeptics . . . see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
– John F. Kennedy

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
– Evan Esar

Twenty

A wise system of education will at last teach us how little man yet knows, how much he has still to learn. – Sir John Lubbock

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. – Sir William Haley

Nineteen

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be ignited.
– Plutarch

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
– William Butler Yeats

Eighteen

Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.
– Aeschylus

Education is the best provision for old age. – Aristotle

Seventeen

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. – Robert Maynard Hutchins

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursuing his education.
– John W. Gardner

Sixteen

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
– Alexander Pope

Fifteen

He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning. – Danish proverb

He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever. – Chinese proverb

Fourteen

A true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.
– Amos Bronson Alcott

Thirteen

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

A child's wisdom is also wisdom. – Jewish proverb

Twelve

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. – Gail Godwin

Nine-tenths of education is encouragement. – Anatole France

Eleven

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher. – Elbert Hubbard

They know enough who know how to learn. – Henry Brooks Adams

Ten

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. – Epictetus

Nine

Public education is the link between our nation and our dream of liberty and justice for all. – Elaine Griffin (1995 National Teacher of the Year)

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained. – James A. Garfield

Eight

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. – H. G. Wells

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.
– John F. Kennedy

Seven

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever or whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
– Thomas H. Huxley

Six

Every September is like Christmas, and every student, a surprise gift to open. – Mary Bicouvaris

There is something wonderful about seeing the students come back each fall. It doesn't matter if you're teaching all ages or the same age. When they come in, it is a new beginning, a fresh start. It's a rebirth of the class for sure, but it is also a personal rebirth. You get to try it again, to be better at it. I get to do my favorite things all over again and do it fresh, with new faces in front of me. And new minds that are going to go "ah-ha." – Mark Mattson

Five

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. – Samuel Johnson

It is by studying little things that we attain great knowledge of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
– Samuel Johnson

Four

If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist has forty people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. – Donald D. Quinn

Three

Education is the movement from darkness to light. – Allan Bloom

Education is light, lack of it darkness. – Russian proverb

Two

The only way to help kids become generous, responsible people and lifelong learners is to work with them to solve problems and make decisions. But that takes time. It also takes care, skill, and in some cases, courage because we have to reconsider the validity of our requests. We need to begin by thinking hard about what we’re asking kids to do: Who benefits from our requests? Is there another way? – Alfie Kohn

One

You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens. – Ethel Barrymore

I have no riches but my thoughts. Yet these are wealth enough for me. – Sara Teasdale


180 Days of School

This blog is a collection of quotes and quotations about school, education, teaching, teachers, and children as students. The idea is to post a quote or two every day for 180 days, the length of a typical school year in the United States.