Quotes from Myles Horton

I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first.

You can't be a revolutionary, you can't want to change society if you don't love people, there's no point in it.

When people criticize me for not having any respect for existing structures and institutions, I protest. I say I give institutions and structures and traditions all the respect that I think they deserve. That's usually mighty little, but there are things that I do respect. They have to earn that respect. They have to earn it by serving people. They don't earn it just by age or legality or tradition.

Curiosity is very important I think, and I think too much of education, starting with childhood education, is either designed to kill curiosity or it works out that way anyway.

I think if I had to put a finger on what I consider a good education, a good radical education, it wouldn't be anything about methods or techniques. It would be loving people first.

Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they're already together and you try to keep from destroying life by segmenting it, overorganizing it and dehumanizing it. You try to keep things together. The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas.

Nothing will change until we change - until we throw off our dependence and act for ourselves.

Any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent.

I don't know what to do, and if I did know what to do I wouldn't tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I'd have to tell you tomorrow, and when I'm gone you'd have to get somebody else to tell you.

The critic said, but don't you feel awkward about biting the hand that feeds you? I said no, I enjoy just gnawing it up to the shoulder.

I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone. Your knowledge, my knowledge, everybody's knowledge should be made use of. I think people who refuse to use other people's knowledge are making a big mistake. Those who refuse to share their knowledge with other people are making a great mistake, because we need it all. I don't have any problem about ideas I got from other people. If I find them useful, I'll just ease them right in and make them my own.

I'm much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don't work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.

You can't be a revolutionary, you can't want to change society if you don't love people, there's no point in it.

I'm as proud of my inconsistencies as I am my consistencies.

This is a problem, how can we have a body of knowledge and understanding and resist the temptation to misread the interest of the people because we're looking for an opportunity to unload this great load of gold that we have stored up?

Now that was when I felt the [citizenship school] program was successful when it was no longer even part of an organization.

I feel that all knowledge should be in the free-trade zone.

Low periods are a good time to work out the techniques and ways of involving people, ways of having people begin to use critical judgments. In a movement period, it's too late after you get going to stop and do these things. People are too busy doing something else.

There's no such thing as neutrality. The people who use that label are people who unknowingly, for the most part, are dedicated to the support of the status quo.

Well, you have one problem I don't have. You're such powerful teachers that if you even breathe what you believe, it would influence everybody. I don't have that problem. I've always been glad I could get some­ body to pay attention to my ideas, just to share them with them. I don't have to worry about being so over­ powering that everybody will take everything I say for granted.

In education, emotions are involved but they're a part of a whole package including intellect. In charismatic leadership, sometimes only the emotions are involved, and I think there is a danger of people, either good or bad people, getting converts on the basis of not really understanding what it is they're going into.