Quotes About Education

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

She took my hand and squeezed it. "You sold yourself short. You could've been more than a teacher and a coach." I returned the squeeze and said, "Listen to me, Savannah. There's no word in the language I revere more than teacher. None. My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher and it always has. I've honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming one.

You the white teacher. I thought you one of the boys." Then she paused. "You gonna drink it?" "Yep." "Teachers drink?" "Yep." "That's good. Oh Gawd, that's so good. I got some gin in that there paper bag when you finish.

Son, you can do more good at Yamacraw than you could ever do in the Peace Corps. And you would be helping Americans, Pat. And I, for one, think it's very important to help Americans.

As a teacher, I had been a happy man. Now, I was only a diminished one.

American teachers are all trained to think poor; we love conferences and book fairs with hospitality suites, expenses paid and banquets of rubbery chicken, sweet French dressing, and unspeakable peas

Sweet little Jesus, I thought, as I weaved between the desks, these kids don't know crap.

Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt.

I saw the necessity of living and accepting bullcrap in my midst. It was everywhere. In teachers' manuals, in the platitudes muttered by educators, in school boards, in the community, and most significantly, in myself.

He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom.

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

Now here is the good news: while it's true that none of us can know everything, we can all know more tomorrow than we do today

Successful people are those who have learned how to learn. Whether college-educated or self-educated, successful people depend on themselves, not others, for their own knowledge, skills, and wisdom. People who are committed to life-long learning have everything they need to shape their own.

I don't teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true.

I think the best way to teach well is to be always learning something. Don't you agree?

People need books like zombies need brains.

For well over a thousand years, from about A.D. 500 to 1700, the civilizations of western Africa flourished. Most of us know nothing about them. During the same period, Europe suffered from constant warfare and only slowly recovered its lost glory. The history of the "Dark Ages" and the Renaissance is taught in every school. Most of Africa's history, except for that of Egypt, remains unknown to general readers.

Christopher sipped with pleasure at a single brandy, prolonging it. "I have serious doubts about the value of democracy. That's a terrible thing for an American to say, isn't it? Democracy depends on a certain minimal level of education for everybody, and America tries to give it to everybody—but we really haven't got it. And it isn't even true that everybody wants it. . . .

Instead of teaching the kids to be weapons, we should be teaching them how to help people with their gifts. Or just how to survive without looking like freaks. But we have no instruction books.

Professors are very great men. They shape the minds of our future.

We need a national Forgive the Ignorant Day

If the good news from cyberspace is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us aren't very good at it. Our words don't do justice to our ideas.

There were times when the blessings of education appeared a little over-rated, since it seemed only to enable the nations to quarrel with greater fluency in some modern Tower of Babel.

an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior.