Ninety-Two

To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you. – Elie Wiesel

Ninety-One (excellence)

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Aristotle

Excellence is not an act but a habit. The things you do the most are the things you will do best. – Marva Collins

Ninety

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. – James Madison

Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent. – Samuel Johnson

Eighty-Nine

My own wish for children is that they learn to find joy even amidst the world's and their own imperfections, that they grow to have a clear but forgiving interior voice to guide them, and that they come to have a reasonable sense of shame without unreasonable burdens of guilt. – Fred Rogers

Eighty-Eight

By learning you will teach, by teaching you will learn.
– Latin proverb

Even while they teach, men learn. – Seneca

Eighty-Seven

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. – Alice Miller

Eighty-Six

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
– Edward Everett

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
– Thomas Jefferson

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
– James Madison

Eighty-Five

All I really need to know … I learned in kindergarten.
– Robert Fulghum

Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten. – Wendy Kaminer

Eighty-Four

When we sent our first child off to school I experienced a jarring moment, an epiphany. I had been teaching young children for many years, advising parents on a wide range of issues, including the best and most painless ways to separate from their youngsters at school. When my own time came, I found that all my good advice to others was impossible to follow myself.... I felt like a midwife friend of mine who had assisted in the births of hundreds of babies before her own first child was born. In the middle of labor she cried out, “I’ve told hundreds of women, ‘you can do it,’ and it can’t be done.” – William Ayres

Eighty-Three

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time. – Rabbinical saying

The potential of a child is the most intriguing and stimulating thing in all creation. – Ray L. Wilbur

Eighty-Two

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 thoughts of other men. – Bill Beattie

Eighty-One

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before. – Elbert Hubbard

The mentor/teacher is the person who sees who you are, sees your beauty, falls in love with it, helps and inspires it, giving it a chance to bloom in the world. – James Hillman

Eighty

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

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
– Flannery O'Conner

Seventy-Nine

The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.
– bell hooks

Seventy-Eight

Imparting knowledge is only lighting other men's candles at our lamp, without depriving ourselves of any flame. – Jane Porter

A teacher is the candle that lights others in consuming itself.
– Giovanni Ruffini

Seventy-Seven

When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history.
– Jane Alexander

Seventy-Six

Experience teaches only the teachable. – Aldous Huxley

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

Seventy-Five

Children have more need of models than of critics.
– Joseph Joubert

If there is anything education does not lack today, it is critics.
– Nathan M. Pusey