quotations about teaching
I learned that religious/spiritual teaching is a very powerful means of biased indoctrination that uses guilt and fear to squelch freedom of thought and open honest inquiry.
CARTER WARDEN
"Categorically Shedding Decades of Clergy Guilt", Patheos, June 15, 2017
Teaching is an art, not a science, principally because it involves human beings, their emotions and their values.
GILBERT HIGHET
The Art of Teaching
No teaching is complete that does not issue in plain and intelligent expression of the truth taught; but it is the most miserable of mockeries when, in place of leading the child to perfect and put into its own simple speech its own simple conceptions of truth, we impose upon it the ready-made definitions of some learned master or teacher, dressed, for the most part, in words it never heard before.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
JOHN STEINBECK
"...like captured fireflies"
Teaching is a really special form of cooperative activity. Aristotle says that teaching only happens when the student is learning. That's because the teaching and learning happen in the same place, in the student, in the mind of another person.
AGNES CALLARD
"2017 Quantrell and Graduate Teaching Awards", UChicago News, June 5, 2017
If I were president? First thing I'd do is take care of the schoolteachers. I'm not saying we should start 'em out with six figures, but in some places they've got to be mother, father, brother, sister, and mentor. They're real important people. Let's give 'em a raise -- and attract the best people to the job.
CARMELLO ANTHONY
Esquire, January 2005
Be versed in ancient lore, and familiarize yourself with the modern; then may you become teachers.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.
ELBERT HUBBARD
A Thousand & One Epigrams
Teaching is the systematic inculcation of knowledge.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching
O ye! who teach the ingenious youth of nations,
Holland, France, England, Germany or Spain,
I pray ye flog them upon all occasions,
It mends their morals, never mind the pain.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
It is better to teach a few things perfectly than many things indifferently.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
An Art of Living
It is always the teacher who must learn the most ... or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
The Years of Rice and Salt
None can teach admirably if not loving his task.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
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.
BARACK OBAMA
National Education Association Speech, 2007
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College, Pasadena, California
One thing that isn't a myth about teachers is that they love the actual act of teaching. However, sometimes teachers can be made to feel as if their wings are being clipped by ever-changing guidelines and standards that demand they rework, rewrite, and resubmit curricula and lesson plans for approval, when the materials and ideas they'd already developed were working well.
GINA BELLI
"8 Reasons Teaching Is More Difficult Than You Think (Not One Is About the Kids)", PayScale, October 23, 2016
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
JOHN LUBBOCK
The Pleasures of Life
Great knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been well instructed, but still greater knowledge is requisite to instruct those who have been neglected.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
HAIM G. GINOTT
Young Children, vol. 51, 1964
The teacher is a sympathizing guide whose familiarity with the subjects to be learned enables him to direct the learner's efforts, to save him from the waste of time and strength, or needless or insuperable difficulties, and to keep him from mistaking truth for error. But no aid of school or teacher can change nature's modes in mind work, or take from the learner the lordly prerogative and need for knowing for himself.
JOHN MILTON GREGORY
The Seven Laws of Teaching