Famous Quotes & Sayings

Maria Montessori

...we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.

Maria Montessori

Teach by teaching, not by correcting

Maria Montessori

The teacher's task is not a small easy one! She has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger. She is not like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. The needs of the child are clearly more difficult to answer.

Maria Montessori

It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.

Edward de Bono

Teaching thinking for just five hours to unemployed youngsters increased employment 500 percent.

Edward Bach

In our western civilization we have the glorious example, the great standard of perfection and the teachings of the Christ to guide us. He acts for us as Mediator between our personality and our Soul.

Eckhart Tolle

Personally, I don't teach practices as such. The power of the teaching is sufficient without needing to go for any practice.

Eckhart Tolle

Now if a teacher gives you a practice, he or she would perhaps point out when you don't need it anymore or you realize yourself when you don't need it anymore.

Eckhart Tolle

Some of the first human beings in whom the new consciousness emerged fully became the great teachers of humanity, such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, or Jesus, although their teachings were greatly misunderstood, especially when they turned into organized religion. They were the first manifestations of the flowering of human consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle

When there's a teacher who embodies presence, then it seems to come for a while through that opening. The teacher is an opening to presence.

Eckhart Tolle

I've received more and more emails from teachers saying that they are beginning to teach presence in their classroom without necessarily calling it that or calling it anything, not as part of the official curriculum. It's like an underground movement not yet officially recognized by the educational authorities - at least not as far as I know!

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them. They have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne. Americans do not need to drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing.

John F. Kennedy

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

John F. Kennedy

I think when we talk about corporal punishment, and we have to think about our own children, and we are rather reluctant, it seems to me, to have other people administering punishment to our own children, because we are reluctant, it puts a special obligation on us to maintain order and to send children out from our homes who accept the idea of discipline. So I would not be for corporal punishment in the school, but I would be for very strong discipline at home so we don't place an unfair burden on our teachers.

Jonathan Kozol

Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

Jonathan Kozol

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

Jonathan Kozol

In public schooling, social policy has been turned back almost one hundred years.

Jonathan Kozol

My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle.

Jonathan Kozol

I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.

Jonathan Kozol

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.

Jonathan Kozol

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

Jonathan Kozol

I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I'll feel my life has been worth it.

Jonathan Kozol

The future teachers I try to recruit are those show have refused to let themselves be neutered in this way, either in their private lives or in the lives that they intend to lead in school. When they begin to teach, they come into their classrooms with a sense of affirmation of the goodness and the fullness of existence, with a sense of satisfaction in discovering the unexpected in their students, and with a longing to surprise the world, their kids, even themselves, with their capacity to leave each place they've been ... a better and more joyful place than it was when they entered it.

Jonathan Kozol

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

Jonathan Kozol

Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.

Jonathan Kozol

Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.

Jonathan Kozol

I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers.

Jonathan Lethem

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

Jonathan Edwards

Teachers and learners are correlates, one of which was never intended to be without the other.

Jonas Salk

Solutions come through evolution. They come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. It is the questions that we must define and discover. You don't invent the answer-you reveal the answer.

Jon Secada

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

Jon Secada

Even before I became a recording artist, I did other things in music. I was a teacher, I did studio work, and I was an arranger and a producer.

Jonah Lehrer

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.