Quotes About Education

If teachers are uncomfortable at their own school, they will pass on their uncertainties or negative attitude to students.

But later in high school she became both bored and confused. Bored at the trivia she was taught and confused by the inconsistencies of the teachers who taught it. She wanted to learn how to deal with reality and evaluate it objectively, how to think. She was taught that language has no meaning, poetry needs no structure, and philosophy is fine in theory but useless in practice.

The Frankfurt School masterminds for indoctrination into collectivist mindsets. Those men's understanding of human psychology was infallible: Ideas that the general public sees and hears on a repetitive basis will eventually achieve agreement with the ideas put forth or impair the individual judgment necessary to refute them.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.

One's work may be finished someday, but one's education never.

Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.

All right, class, now let's bow our heads in prayer and thank God for this milk we're drinking.' At which point I stood up and said, 'No, Miss Wilson, I think you'll find that the milk comes to us via the Milk Marketing Board, a public body set up in 1933 to control the production, pricing and distribution of milk and other dairy products within the UK. It has nothing to do with the intervention of some questionable divine entity.

When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education . . . the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint . . . . It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. . . . they neglect their chief business which is to remain their own masters.

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.

Education is important because, first of all, people need to know that discrimination still exists. It is still real in the workplace, and we should not take that for granted.

Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.

The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable," says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it's what the learner learns. And so it is in families. What matters is the message our kids receive, not the one we think we're sending.

Students get the message bout what adults want. When 4th graders in a variety of classroomswere asked what their teachers most wanted them to do, they didn't say, "Ask thoughtful questions" or "Make responsible decisions" or Help others." They said, "Be quiet, don't fool around, and get our work done on time.

Many mothers and father return each evening from their paid jobs only to serve as homework monitors, a position for which they never applied.

Hence a report from Harvard's own "Committee on Raising the Standard": "Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work." Except that report was written in—you saw this coming, didn't you?—1894.

S. Neill put it, promising a reward for an activity is "tantamount to declaring that the activity is not worth doing for its own sake."26 Thus, a parent who says to a child, "If you finish your math homework, you may watch an hour of TV" is teaching the child to think of math as something that isn't much fun.

I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A "good" child—from infancy to adolescence—is one who isn't too much trouble to us grown-ups.

In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a "teachable moment," an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not "You've misbehaved; now here's what I'm going to do to you" but "Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it?

a grade can be regarded only as an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material.

Every hour that teachers spend preparing kids to succeed on standardized tests, even if that investment pays off, is an hour not spent helping kids to become critical, curious, creative thinkers.)

Obviously, things work best when parents and teachers are helping kids to become good people—and, better yet, when they're actively supporting one another's efforts.

We accept without question that children have to memorize the state capitals even though they could look up that information whenever they need it. Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a "how" answer to what is really a "why" question.

We may not be able to say, "Don't watch," but we can watch with them and show them how to view critically, how to recognize propaganda tricks used to sell them stuff they don't need, how to identify hidden values and defuse attempts to manipulate them.