One Hundred Seventy-Seven

Teachers don’t just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills. – Charles Platt

Good schools are schools for the development of the whole child. They seek to help children develop to their maximum their social powers and their intellectual powers, their emotional capacities, their physical powers. – James L. Hymes, Jr.

One Hundred Seventy

In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards. - Mark Twain.

One Hundred Fifty-Nine

Each second we live in a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and will never be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four, and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? You should say to each of them: "Do you know what you are? You are unique. In all the world there is no other child exactly like you. In the millions of years that have passed there has never been a child like you. And look at your body – what a wonder it is! Your legs, your arms, you cunning fingers, the way you move! You may be a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel." – Pablo Casals

One Hundred Fifty-Seven

A positive learning climate in a school for young children is a composite of many things. It is an attitude that respects children. It is a place where children receive guidance and encouragement from the responsible adults around them. It is an environment where children can experiment and try out new ideas without fear of failure. It is an atmosphere that builds children’s self-confidence so they dare to take risks. It is an environment that nurtures a love of learning. – Carol B. Hillman

One Hundred Forty

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. – Malcolm X

We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet. – Margaret Mead

One Hundred Twenty-Six

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. – George Santayana

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. – George Bernard Shaw

One Hundred Eighteen

A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life. – Elbert Hubbard

Life is amazing: and the teacher had better prepare himself to be a medium for that amazement! – Edward Blishen

Ninety-Seven

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. – Jerome Bruner

Ninety-Three

If you think education is expensive – try ignorance. – Derek Bok

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.– Mark Twain

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

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-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

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

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

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

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