Quotes from Deborah Meier

Good schools, like good societies and good families, celebrate and cherish diversity.

It's the curiosity that drives me. It's making a difference in the world that prevents me from ever giving up.

There's no way to guarantee that any particular system will work, will work forever, or will not need endless revising. But until we get over the idea that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to schools, above all for schools that are trustworthy enough to do the job well, we won't allow ourselves to do the difficult long-term work of redesigning the system, not just the schools.

When we talk with school officials and local politicians about restructuring large high schools, the first thing they worry about is what will happen to the basketball or baseball teams, the after-school program, and other sideshows; that the heart of the school, its capacity to educate, is missing, seems almost beside the point.

The ways schools were organized (the homogeneous tracks, the division of students by age), their scale of virtues (where the worst sins involved talking out of turn or not standing properly in line, while generosity was barely noticed), the labels "academic" and "nonacademic" all offered glimpses into social history. Why, for example, was putting together a student newspaper nonacademic, whereas lessons in handwriting or filling in multiple-choice workbooks were academic?

We learned that it takes months, even years, to see some ideas take shape. Above all, we recognized that caring for others is very hard to do if you don't see yourself as capable of being helpful to them. There is a terrible and seemingly pointless pain in powerless caring, and it erodes the capacity for affection. To hear a story and be faced with either ignoring it or being a martyr to everyone else's woes are the usual choices available. A school that is a community has other possibilities.

A passion for learning...isn't something you have to inspire with; it's something you have to keep from extinguishing.

Teaching is listening, learning is talking

Teaching is mostly listening, and learning is mostly telling.

Only secretly rebellious teachers have ever done right by our least advantaged kids.