Quotes from William Glasser

Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

There is no real reason to fail a child," "Once children start failing, they begin to believe that they can't do anything. They give up.

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.

You can acquire a lot of knowledge without ever going to school.

The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.

We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can't relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he'll never be a competent teacher.

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.

Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.

In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.

If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.

Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, or perhaps later in life, yes when we should say no.

There is plenty of competition in a Glasser Quality School in that there is winning but no losing.

Told that the passing grade is a B or competence and that we will help you to get there, students do competent work. The lowest passing grade in the real world is competence. Why do schools accept so much less?

Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.

Using no control and using humor will build a relationship and make a dent to where the client puts the counselor in their quality world and then begins to relate and seek out the counselor. Effective therapy begins with the acceptance of the therapist into the client's quality world.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.

No human being will work hard at anything unless they believe that they are working for competence.

If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.

What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.

The more a person perceives that he/she is loved, the less they will interfere with the lives of others.

Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.

I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.