education 2 - learning - teaching

Education does not mean teaching people to
know what they do not know; it means teaching
them to behave as they do not behave.

John Ruskin
   

Education should never work against a person's destiny, but should
achieve the full development of his or her own dispositions.  The
education of people today so often lags behind the talents and
tendencies which their destinies have implanted in them.  We must
keep pace with these powers to such an extent that the human
beings in our care can win their way through to all that their destinies
will allow--to the fullest clarity of thought, the most loving deepening
of their feeling, and the greatest possible energy and ability of will.
This can only be done by an art of education and teaching which
is based on a real knowledge of people.

Rudolf Steiner

      
Education would be much more effective if its purpose was
to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl
should know how much they do not know,
and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

William Haley
  
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

John Dewey
   

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how
to think, than what to think - rather to improve
our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves,
than to load the memory with thoughts of other people.

Bill Beattie

  

We are failing in schools of education because we're not helping teachers to shed
the role of teachers and become human beings and to realize that they are guides.
To the extent to which they recognize this, so will they be successful in the classroom
because a kid can recognize a guide. . . . Imagine what it would be like if everyone
in this room had the opportunity to be encouraged to be a unique human being.  But you
know how it seems to me?  That the essence of our educational system is to make
everybody like everybody else.  And when we've done that, we consider ourselves
very lucky, indeed.  You see it happening all the time!  "I'm not interested in your
uniqueness.  I'm interested in knowing if I have succeeded in giving you me, and
to the extent to which you can parrot me, I have been a successful teacher."

Leo Buscaglia
   

  

I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way.
I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you.

George Bernard Shaw
   

You know that I don't believe that anyone
has ever taught anything to anyone.  I
question the efficacy of teaching.  The
only thing that I know is that anyone
who wants to learn will learn.  And
maybe a teacher is a facilitator,
a person who puts things down and
shows people how exciting and
wonderful it is and asks them to eat.

Carl Rogers
  

Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines.  If we
remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to
be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting,
but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic
needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems
boredom really is.  Research has shown that boredom is closely related to
frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability,
withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show.

Fritz Redl
   
   
   

Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving
your community and world better than you found it.

Marian Wright Edelman
It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not
to fill the minds of students with facts. . . it is to teach them
to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves.

Robert Hutchins

It can be tempting to blame others for
our loss of direction.  We get lots of information about
life but little education in life from parents, teachers,
and other authority figures who should know better from
their experience.  Information is about facts.  Education is about
wisdom and the knowledge of how to love and survive.

Bernie Siegel

   
   

   

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate
any plan or system respecting it, I can only say
that I view it as the most important subject which
we as a people may be engaged in.

Abraham Lincoln
    
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will
look back at education as it is practiced in most schools
today and wonder how we could tolerated anything so primitive.

John W. Gardner
  

Education is a companion which no future can depress, no crime
can destroy, no enemy can alienate it and no nepotism can enslave.

Ropo Oguntimehin
   

More money is put into prisons than into schools.  That, in itself,
is the description of a nation bent on suicide.  I mean, what
is more precious to us than our own children?  We are going to build
a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.

Jonathan Kozol
   

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This is about helping children become themselves.  What is a school if it isn't helping people
find what they want to do?  I don't just mean careers.  I mean teaching how to sing, dance,
paint, act, write poetry, play tennis, play the guitar.  We'd be a better, more harmonious
society if people had these interests developed when they were young. But they don't.
That's a cause of depression.  And the things I'm talking about:  children need them here
[in school], but the more deprived the background, the less the infrastructure at home,
the greater the need.  If schools aren't going to do these things, who is?

Anthony Seldon

   

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.

Joseph Campbell
   

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

W. B. Yeats
  
Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts,
skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making
visible what is hidden as a seed. . . To be educated, a person doesn't
have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have
been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged
human life. . . One of the greatest problems of our time is that many
are schooled but few are educated.

Thomas Moore
   

   

He had made a passionate study of education, only to come,
gradually, to the knowledge that education is nothing but
the process of building up, gradually, a complete unit of
consciousness.  And each unit of consciousness is the living
unit of that great social, religious, philosophic idea towards
which humankind, like an organism seeking its final form,
is laboriously growing.

D.H. Lawrence.
   

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to
make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done,
whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to
be learned; and however early a person’s training begins,
it is probably the last lesson he or she learns thoroughly.

Thomas Henry Huxley
     

The aim of education should not be to teach how to use
human energies to improve the environment, for we are
finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of
education is the development of the human personality,
and that in this regard education is of immediate
importance for the salvation of mankind.

Maria Montessori
    

It is through education that all the good in the world arises.

Immanuel Kant
   
The true end of education is not only to make the young learned,
but to make them love learning;
not only to make them industrious, but to make them love industry;
not only to make them virtuous, but to make them love virtue;
not only to make them just, but to make them hunger and thirst after justice.

John Ruskin
   

Must we always teach our children with books?
Let them look at the mountains and the stars above.  Let them
look at the beauty of the waters and the trees and flowers on earth.
They will then begin to think,
and to think is the beginning of a real education.

David Polis
   
Articles and book excerpts on education:

Education      Kent Nerburn
    

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

B.F. Skinner
   

    
More people have access to education today than ever before.
But I cannot help but feel that the modern educational
experience is not preparing us adequately to attend the rich
banquet of life.  Certainly the young people of today have
mastered the use of technology and are capable of solving
complex scientific and mathematical problems, but who and
what do these serve if they cannot think for themselves?
If they have no understanding of the meaning and purpose of
their own lives?  If they do not know who they are as individuals?

Matthew Kelly

  education 2 - learning - teaching




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The biggest dilemma in education today is the differing visions
of what an educated person means.  To do well on tests
is often more important than helping young people really
be prepared to deal with the tests of life.

Linda Lantieri
  

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you
do not consider your students to be human beings.

Lou Ann Walker
   

From the time we begin school, if not sooner, we are taught to be blind
to our assets and only see our deficits.  We are carefully marked on
how many we got wrong on a test and, rarely if ever, asked how
we know how to spell the ones we got right.  By the time we are
adults, we are well versed in every one of our limitations, skilled
in our incompetence.  If we were fish in an aquarium, it would be
as if we kept smashing against the glass, and forgot the fact
that we were perfectly capable of turning ever so slightly and
swimming gracefully in the water all around us.

Dawna Markova
I Will Not Die an Unlived Life