favequotes

Favorite Quotes on Teaching and Learning

“Our task, regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains, as high as possible. No one can do more.” Loris Malaguzzi (20th century), Italian early education specialist. Quoted in The Hundred Languages of Children, ch.3, by Carolyn Edwards (1993). “A thousand teachers, a thousand methods.” Chinese proverb “No one should teach who is not in love with teaching.” Margaret E. Sangster (1838-1912), US author, An Autobiography by My Youth Up, Ch. 23 (1909) “Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.” Claus, Sir Morsen (b. 1922 Oxford Daily Telegraph (London August 21, 1990) “Education is improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.” Marian Wright Edelman (20th Century), US Author. The Measure of Our Success; A Letter to My Child and Yours I, p.1 (1992). “Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.” Aeschylus (525- 456 B.C.) Agamemnon, 584 The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) Morituri salutamus “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.” Chinese Proverb “Learning is a treasure which accompanies its owner everywhere.” Chinese Proverb "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 do not teach math, history, science, or grammar - we teach students." - Anonymous “Creatures whose main spring is curiosity will enjoy the accumulating of fact, far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts." Clarence Day "Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre." Gail Godwin "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 warm material, but warmth is a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child." Carl Jung “No one should teach who is not in love with teaching.” Margaret E. Sangster (1838–1912), U.S. author. An Autobiography from My Youth Up, ch. 23 (1909). "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" Henry James, 19th-century American novelist, in “The Art of Fiction." 1884. Theory of Fiction: Henry James. Ed. James E. Miller, Jr. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1972. 35. "Education is about the only thing lying around loose in the world, and it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away." George Horace Latimer, quoted by Garrison Keillor on the Powell’s Bookstore (Portland, Oregon) online Writer’s Almanac site for October 6, 2004: “Learning is a kind of natural food for the mind.” Marcus Tullius Cicero," Acad. Quaest", 4,41. “Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead. “ James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century), U.S. child development specialist, author. Teaching the Child Under Six, ch. 1 (1968). “We are all adult learners. Most of us have learned a good deal more out of school than in it. We have learned from our families, our work, our friends. We have learned from problems resolved and tasks achieved but also from mistakes confronted and illusions unmasked. . . . Some of what we have learned is trivial: some has changed our lives forever.” Laurent A. Daloz (20th century), U.S. educator. Effective Teaching and Mentoring, ch. 1 (1986). “If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 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 "It is greater work to educate a child, in the true and larger sense of the world, than to rule a state" William Ellery Channing "What a teacher is, is more important than what he teaches" Karl Menninger "As with all great teachers, his curriculum was an insignificant part of what he communicated. From him you didn't learn a subject, but a life...Tolerance and justice, fearlessness and pride, reverence and pity, are learned in a course on long division if the teacher has those qualities..." William Alexander Percy "People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching." - Thomas Henry Huxley, Reflection #319, Aphorisms and Reflections "The most important part of teaching = to teach what it is to know." Simone Weil, French philosopher. First and Last Notebooks, pt. 4 "The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contended and happy." Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard “For good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelfful of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us. Good teaching is a certain kind of stance, I think. It is a stance of receptivity, of attunement, of listening.” Laurent A. Daloz (20th century), U.S. educator. Effective Teaching and Mentoring, ch. 9 (1986). “May my teaching drop like the rain, my speech condense like the dew; like gentle rain on grass, like showers on new growth.” Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 32:2 “Learning and teaching should not stand on opposite banks and just watch the river flow by; instead, they should embark together on a journey down the water. Through an active, reciprocal exchange, teaching can strengthen learning how to learn.” Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994), Italian early childhood education specialist. Quoted in The Hundred Languages of Children, ch. 3, by Carolyn Edwards (1993).