Quotes About Education

I've never understood why the knowledge training and rigorous testing of London cabbies isn't rolled out all over the U.K.

I didn't go to school that much! I was racing go karts and testing nearly every day, so school wasn't the first priority.

I'm not one of these guys who thinks testing is the only thing. But testing is a piece but there has to be more human ways to evaluate what job teachers are doing and we have to do a better job of that.

We are raising today's children in sterile, risk-averse and highly structured environments. In so doing, we are failing to cultivate artists, pioneers and entrepreneurs, and instead cultivating a generation of children who can follow the rules in organized sports games, sit for hours in front of screens and mark bubbles on standardized tests.

But the person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance.

Although professors regard improving critical thinking as the most important goal of college, tests reveal that seniors who began their studies with average critical thinking skills have progressed only from the 50th percentile of entering freshmen to about the 69th percentile.

Learning happens in the minds and souls, not in the databases of multiple-choice tests.

Many high school students are under so much competitive pressure. They are sometimes taught that if they don't have a 4.0 GPA, score in the 99th percentile on admissions tests, and demonstrate leadership in sports and participate in clubs, they won't get into college anywhere. Even highly credentialed professionals get caught up in this.

When it comes to efficiency, standardized tests almost sound heaven-sent.

Good tests can help teachers determine how their students are performing and identify the areas in which their students need assistance. Like an X-ray, however, tests can diagnose, but they cannot cure.

As we embark on something as ambitious as the Common Core, educators must be able to teach to the standards with the necessary support and collaboration and without the sense that there will be dire consequences if students, schools and their tests don't make the grade.

Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.

My mother has been my mentor in my life. The number one attribute was discipline. To be on time to school, never miss a day at school, and then checking out homework and making sure I was doing it correctly and signing me up for lots of activities, extra tests and classes.

We've become so accustomed to teaching to the tests that we've forgotten about a child's joy of discovery.

Think about being a teenager and feeling like school is just about taking tests you may or may not be interested in, after which someone will judge whether or not you're smart. No one's going to be inspired by that.

I still have nightmares about taking tests.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

Knowledge may be power, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

The World of Massage Museum,

Genuine education equity will be achieved only when schools serving low-income children mirror in number, variety, and access the options that affluent parents have come to expect for their children.

There is no moral reason for government at any level to prevent the children of engaged and invested Americans of any race, ethnic group, or income level from reaping the full rewards of their talents and ambitions, nor interfering with parents' best efforts to do what they deem best for their children.

What Eva Moskowitz appears to have created is something unprecedented in contemporary education: a mechanism for a critical mass of engaged and invested low-income families of color to self-select into schools where their attitudes, values, and ambitions for their children make them culture keepers and drivers, not outliers.