M - R quotes

View Quote This fallacy [appeal to authority] is not in itself an error; it is impossible to learn much in today's world without letting somebody else crunch the numbers and offer us explanations. And teachers are sources of necessary information. But how we choose our "authorities" and place a value on such information, is just another skill rarely taught in our education systems. It's little wonder that to most folk, sound bites and talking heads are enough to count as experts. […] Teaching is reinforcing the appeal to authority, where anybody who seems more intelligent than you must ultimately be right. […] We educators must simply role-model critical thinking. […] Educators themselves have to be prepared to show that "evidence" and "answers" are two separate things by firmly believing that, themselves.

View Quote Mike McRae, Australian teacher and guest columnist, "Educating Future Critical Thinkers", Swift, 31 March 2006.

View Quote School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

View Quote H.L. Mencken The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), pg. 217

View Quote The very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth: and this without a particle of regard to the results to which the exercise of that power may lead, even though it should conduct the pupil to opinions diametrically opposite to those of his teachers. We say this, not because we think opinions unimportant, but because of the immense importance which we attach to them; for in proportion to the degree of intellectual power and love of truth which we succeed in creating, is the certainty that (whatever may happen in any one particular instance) in the aggregate of instances true opinions will be the result; and intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoner is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them.

View Quote John Stuart Mill "Civilization," London and Westminster Review (April 1836).

View Quote The schoolmaster is the person who builds up the intelligence of the pupil; the intelligence of the pupil increases in direct proportion to the efforts of the teacher; in other words, he knows just what the master has made him know and understands neither more nor less than the master has made him understand. When an inspector visits a school and questions the pupils he turns to the master, and if he is satisfied says: "Well done, teacher!" For the result is indubitably the work of the master; the discipline by which he has fixed the attention of his pupils, even to the psychical mechanism which has guided him in his teaching, all is due to him. God enters the school as a symbol in the crucifix, but the creator is the teacher.

View Quote Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education (available at gutenberg.org).

View Quote "To make oneself interesting artificially," that is, interesting to those who have no interest in us, is indeed a very difficult task; and to arrest the attention hour after hour, and year after year, not of one, but of a multitude of persons who have nothing in common with us, not even years, is indeed a superhuman undertaking. Yet this is the task of the teacher, or, as he would say, his "art": to make this assembly of children whom he has reduced to immobility by discipline follow him with their minds, understand what he says, and learn; an internal action, which he cannot govern, as he governs the position of their bodies, but which he must win by making himself interesting, and by maintaining this interest.

View Quote Maria Montessori, Spontaneous Activity in Education (available at gutenberg.org).

View Quote Charles Xavier: A new generation of mutants is emerging, that much is certain. They will be called freaks. Genetic monstrosities. [...] But they are emerging in the inner cities, in the suburbs, in the deserts and the jungles. And when they emerge, they will need teachers, people who can help them overcome their anger and show them how to use their strange gifts responsibly. They will need us.

View Quote Grant Morrison New X-Men Vol 1. #114 E is for Extinction

View Quote For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. [...] There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis.

View Quote Bill Moyers, "America 101", speech at the fiftieth anniversary of the Council of Great City Schools, 27 October 2006, Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 237.

View Quote Ethics could teach us only those purposes and ideals. If the teachers seeks insight into the means by which the aim can be reached, into the facts by which the child can be molded, his way must lead from ethics to psychology. (...) Water flows downhill, anyhow, but to bring the water uphill hydraulic forces are indeed necessary. To overcome nature and instead to prepare for a life of ideals, to inhibit personal desires and instead to learn to serve the higher purposes indeed demands most serious and most systematic efforts. It is the teachers' task to make these efforts with all his best knowledge of mind and body, of social and of cultural values.

View Quote Hugo Munsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909 (new edition, 2006), pp. 64-65.

View Quote A good teacher does not draw out; he gives out, and what he gives out is love. And by love I mean approval, or if you like, friendliness, good nature. The good teacher not only understands the child: he approves of the child.

View Quote A. S. Neill, The Problem Teacher (1939), p. 11.

View Quote Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test; we know that's not true.

View Quote Barack Obama, National Education Association Speech, 2007

View Quote What constitutes the teacher is the passion to make scholars, and again and again it happens that the great scholar has no such passion whatever.

View Quote George Herbert Palmer, The Ideal Teacher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin; 1910), page 9.

View Quote Since human beings are highly adaptable it may be possible for an individual with any sort of competence to learn, in the end, according to any teaching strategy. But the experiments show, very clearly indeed, that the rate, quality and durability of learning is crucially dependent upon whether or not the teaching strategy is of a sort that suits the individual

View Quote Gordon Pask (1972) Learning Strategies and Individual Competence p. 221.

View Quote We need organizers and builders of a new society, we need warriors for a new way of life. Self government is our most effective educational instrument of producing such organizers, builders, and warriors.

View Quote Pinkevich, Outlines of Pedagogy,

View Quote In a democratic state the schoolmaster is afraid of his pupils and flatters them, and the pupils despise both schoolmaster and pedagogues. The young expect the same treatment as the old, and contradict them and quarrel with them. In fact, seniors have to flatter their juniors, in order not to be thought morose old do****.

View Quote Plato, Republic.

View Quote Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

View Quote Plato, Republic 493a, Plato: The Collected Dialogues (Princeton: 1961), p. 729.

View Quote What's all the noisy jargon of the schools?

View Quote John Pomfret, Reason (1700), line 57.

View Quote Men must be taught as if you taught them not,And things unknown propos'd as things forgot.

View Quote Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), Part III, line 15.

View Quote To dazzle let the vain design,To raise the thought and touch the heart, be thine!

View Quote Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle II, line 249.

View Quote I have found that corrections done in a firm and fair manner with an explanation are appreciated, not resented. Always try to turn the encounter into a mutually positive learning experience. These truths are known to every good classroom teacher, every good coach, every good violin teacher, and every good construction foreman. Mistakes that have become deeply rooted habits- in a batter's stance, in a violinist's fingering, in a child's table manners, in a roofer's roofing skills- drive teachers, coaches, foremen, and parents nuts. You have to catch them all early, and properly train the correct actions, skills, and behaviors. Leaders who do not have the guts to immediately correct minor errors or shortcomings cannot be counted on to have the guts to deal with the big things.

View Quote Colin Powell, It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership (2012), p. 91

View Quote What they did was sell invisible things. And after they’d sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked.

View Quote Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (2003), Chapter 1

View Quote Education is unfolding the wings of head and heart together. A true teacher pushes the students out of the nest to strengthen the wings.

View Quote Amit Ray. Walking the Path of Compassion

View Quote It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

View Quote Kim Stanley Robinson,The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), Book 2, Ch. 5.

View Quote Whoever enters the Way without a guide will take a hundred years to travel a two-day journey. The Prophet said "In this way you have no more faithful companion than your works." How can these works and this earning in the way of righteousness be accomplished without a master, O father? Can you practice the meanest profession in the world without a master's guidance? Whoever undertakes a profession without a master becomes the laughingstock of city and town.

View Quote Rumi Mathnavi translated by William Chittick pp. 122-123 as quoted in Classical Islam and Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition by Muhammad Hisham Kabbani p. 153