Friday, December 15, 2006

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

Thursday, December 14, 2006

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

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

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

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

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

Monday, December 11, 2006

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

Friday, December 08, 2006

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

Thursday, December 07, 2006

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

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

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

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

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

Monday, December 04, 2006

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

Friday, December 01, 2006

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.