Education Quotations

Those who can do.
Those who can't teach.
Those who can't teach train teachers.
Those who can't train teachers write teacher training textbooks.
Those who can't write teacher training textbooks write state assessment tests.
Yours truly, Steve Nordby

If anything concerns me, it's the oversimplification of something as complex as assessment. My fear is that learning is becoming standardized. Learning is idiosyncratic. Learning and teaching is messy stuff. It doesn't fit into bubbles.
Michele Forman, 2001 Teacher of the Year, quoted by the Associated Press.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
Mark Twain (1835–1910), U.S. author. "Following the Equator," ch. 61, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897)

School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956), U.S. journalist. "Travail," Baltimore Evening Sun (8 Oct. 1928; repr. in A Mencken Chrestomathy, pt. 17, 1949)

One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.
Maria Montessori

No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. . . . No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.
Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Socrates, The Republic, bk. 7, sct. 536

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English dramatist, poet. Jack Cade, in King Henry VI, pt. 2, act 4, sc. 7

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German-born U.S. physicist. Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College, Pasadena, California

[T]he most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to provide them with a sense of coherence in their studies; that is, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn . . . [In modern secular education, the] curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects.
Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity

Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.
Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, 1861 - 1947.

Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
Adolf Hitler

Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be "taught" if they are to learn. . . . Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I'm angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own.
Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.
Henry Lewis Stimson (1867–1950), U.S. Secretary of State (1929-1933), U.S. Secretary of War (1911-1912 and 1940-1945)

I think my deepest criticism of the educational system at that period [junior high and high school], and that also applies to other periods, is that it's all based upon a distrust of the student. Don't trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not.
Carl Rogers (1902 - ) U.S. psychologist, in R. Evans Carl Rogers: The Man and His Ideas, (1975), p. 39

Of course, Behaviorism "works." So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
W. H. Auden (1907–73), Anglo-American poet. "A Certain World," Behaviorism (1970)

Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can't tell a pigeon from a poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence or beat them into oblivion.
Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), U.S. linguist, political analyst. "For Reasons of State," Psychology and Ideology (1973; first published 1971 as a review of B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity)

If we ever do end up acting just like rats or Pavlov's dogs, it will be largely because behaviorism has conditioned us to do so.
Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949), U.S. journalist, critic. "Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling," Psychobabble (1977)

Our schools have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots. We no longer send our young to them primarily to be taught and given the tools of thought, no longer primarily to be informed and acquire knowledge; but to be "socialized" -- which in the current semantic means to be regimented and made to conform.
Robert Lindner, psychoanalyst in Must You Conform? (1956)

Using behaviorism to control learning is like using an umbrella to control the weather.
Yours truly, Steve Nordby

While children's perceptions of the world and opportunities for genuine spontaneity and creativity are being systematically eliminated from the kindergarten, unquestioned obdeience to authority and rote learning of meaningless material are being encouraged
Harry L. Gracey, sociologist, "Learning the Student Role: Kindergarten as Academic Boot Camp" in H. Stub (ed.)The Sociology of Education: A Sourcebook (1975)

School administrators intone that "in order for learning to take place, there must be order in the classroom." That may be true, but I feel the emphasis is in the wrong place. In order for learning to take place, there should be something worth learning.
Susan Ohanian, teacher and writer, "There's Only One True Technique for Good Discipline," in Who's in Charge? (1994)

When a teacher complains that students are "off task" - a favorite bit of educational jargon - the behaviorist will leap to the rescue with a program to get them back "on" again. The more reasonable response to this complaint is to ask, "What's the task?" Not surprisingly, this way of framing the problem meets with considerable resistance on the part of many educators. More than once I have been huffily informed that life isn't always interesting, and kids had better learn to deal with this fact. . . . Thus is the desire to control children, or the unwillingness to create a worthwhile curriculum, rationalized as being in the best interests of the students.
Alfie Kohn, social psychologist, Punished by Rewards (1993)

The function of education has never been to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape Homo sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, multilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern . . . for where every man is unique there is no society, and where there is no society there can be no man. Contemporary American educators think they want creative children, yet it is an open question as to what they expect these children to create. And certainly the classrooms -- from kindergarten to graduate school -- in which they expect it to happen are not crucibles of creative activity and thought. It stands to reason that were young people truly creative the culture would fall apart, for originality, by definition, is different from what is given, and what is given is the culture itself. From the endless, pathetic, "creative hours" of kindergarten to the most abtruse problems in sociology and anthropology, the function of education is to prevent the truly creative intellect from getting out of hand.
Jules Henry, Culture Against Man

Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
Baruch Spinoza (1632 - 1677)

Schools and colleges have until now (to recap briefly) served a society that needed reliable, predictable human components. Appropriately enough, they spent overwhelming amounts of time and energy ironing out those human impulses and capabilities which seemed errant. Since learning involves behavioral change, lifelong learning was the most errant of behaviors and was not to be countenanced. Educational institutions, therefore, were geared to stop learning. Perhaps half of all learning ability was squelched in the earliest elementary grades, where children found out that there exist predetermined and unyielding "right answers" for everything, that following instructions is what really counts and, most surprisingly, that the whole business of education is mostly dull and painful.
George B. Leonard, journalist and educational consultant, Education and Ecstasy (1968)

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
Gautama Buddha

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.
Cicero (Quoted by Montaigne)

I hate quotations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Feedback welcome! Steven M. Nordby