Here are some educational quotes which I find inspiring and informative.
Quick Links:
John Holt
Albert Einstein
A S Neill
"Education comes from living life, following passions, accessing information,
observing, reflecting, and being inspired by wise and courageous
elders in the community."
- Claire Aumonier
"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."
- W B Yeats
John Holt
"A child has no stronger desire than to make sense of the world, to move freely in it, to do the things that he sees bigger people doing."
"We should try...to teach that respecting property does not mean never
touching what is not yours, but means treating objects carefully, using them as they are meant to be used, & putting them back where they belong."
"The really able thinkers in our class turn out to be, without exception, children who don't feel so strongly the need to please grownups. Some of them are good students, some not so good; but good or not, they don't work to please us, but to please themselves."
"One thing we see in our intelligent children is that they are intensely involved with life. Rachel (etc) all are daydreamers. But Barbara (etc) don't withdraw from life; they embrace it. We spoke once of a love affair with learning. These children seem to have a love affair with life ... Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense. They check their answers & their thoughts against common sense ... It seems as if what we call intelligent children feel that the universe can be trusted even when it does not seem to make any sense."
"The poor thinker dashes madly after an answer; the good thinker takes his time & looks at the problem...The good thinker can take his time because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. The poor thinker can't stand not knowing; it drives him crazy."
"For many years I have been asking myself why intelligent children act
unintelligently at school. The simple answer is 'Because they're scared'. What I now see for the first time is the mechanism by which fear destroys intelligence, the way it affects a child's whole way of looking at, thinking about, & dealing with life...What is most surprising of all is how much fear there is in school. Why is so little said about it? Perhaps most people do not recognise fear in children when they see it...The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner."
"Even in the kindest & gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time. This is a hard fact of life to deal with. What can we do about it?"
Re: In-depth conversation between father & young son.
"It is a model of how adults can & should but so rarely do talk to children, for it is above all a conversation between equals. Not that the man & the boy are or pretend to be equals in everything; both know very well that the man has much more knowledge & experience. But they are equals, first, because they work as colleagues, are equally involved in the conversation, equally eager & determined to find as much of the truth as they can. And they are equals because the man treats the boy with exactly the respect that he would want an adult colleague to treat him, takes his thoughts, confusions, & questions as seriously as he would want another adult to take his own. Again, we can only envy all children who have such adults to talk to."
"It is probably true of the mind, as well, that the way we use it determines how we can use it. If we use it badly long enough, it will become less & less possible to use it well. If we use it well, the possibility grows that we may use it even better. We must be wary, then, of assuming that because some learning difficulties seem to be caused by brain disfunction they are therefore incurable. The brain, as an organ, may have far more flexibility & recuperative powers than we realize. What it cannot accomplish one way it may be able to do another. Conversely, we must be aware of the extent to which, in causing children to make poor use of their minds, we may be making their minds less & less useful to them."
Re: Learning to speak.
"It is a remarkable business. We are so used to talking that we forget that it takes a very subtle & complicated coordination of lips, tongue, teeth, palate, jaws, cheeks, voice, & breath. Simply as a muscular skill it is by far the most complicated & difficult that most of us ever learn, at least as difficult as the skill required to master a serious musical instrument...
(How does the child learn to speak?)
The answer seems to be by patient & persistent experiment; by trying many thousands of times to make sounds, syllables, & words; by comparing his own sounds to the sounds made by people around him; & by gradually bringing his own sounds closer to the others; above all, by being willing to do things wrong even while trying his best to do them right."
"It can't be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition & only one - when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own."
"The modern world is dangerous, confusing, not meant for children, not
generally kind or welcoming to them. We have much to learn about how to make the world more accessible to them, & how to give them more freedom & competence in exploring it. But this is a very different thing from designing nice little curricula."
Albert Einstein
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry;
for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in
need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack & ruin without fail. It is
a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing & searching can
be promoted by means of coercion & a sense of duty. To the contrary, I
believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of
its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force
the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the
food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly."
A S Neill
"Summerhill...is now a demonstration school, for it demonstrates that
freedom works."
"When my first wife & I began the school, we had one main idea: to make the
school fit the child - instead of making the child fit the school."
"Obviously, a school that makes active children sit at desks studying
mostly useless subjects is a bad school. It is a good school only for
those who believe in such a school, for those uncreative citizens who want docile, uncreative children who will fit into a civilization whose standard of success is money."
"The function of the child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think he should live."
|
