20th-century Educator Quotes

Jaco Pastorius

Yusef Lateef

Eckhart Tolle

Annie Sprinkle

June Wayne

Betty Shabazz

John Holt

When students' language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. Students' silence and nonparticipation under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack of academic ability or effort, and teachers' interactions with students have reflected a pattern of low expectations which become self-fulfilling.

He is gone now. His shop is gone. Weld Square is gone.
His life has been wiped clean off the board.
But I wake in the night and I see his face and I hear his voice.

Charles Reis Felix

The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do

All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments.

I was playing drums, and I had broken my wrist very bad playing football, and the bass player in the band... he wanted to split. So I just went to the bass; I went from Drums over to Bass. That was it. I was playing the bass within a week.

In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.

When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.

The fire put an end to the typically bustling business activities in downtown Beijing. But its psychological impact was much stronger than the financial losses. It left the Beijing residents in a constant state of terror and fear... Most missionary properties, residences of the foreign teachers at the Imperial University and the Eastern and the Southern Cathedrals were reduced to aches. Many Chinese priests and christian converts perished together in the roaring flames.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

Louis Althusser puts it this way: because "class instinct is subjective and spontaneous," the class instinct of the middle classes and "thus of intellectuals" must undergo a painful and "revolutionary" transformation in order to become oppositional—that is, in order to become aligned with the methodology of the oppressed.

It is commonly agreed also that both "great" and "good" can be judged only from a certain distance. Contemporary works can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly judged.

Of Gertrude Stein:

The supreme egocentric of the most perfect clique of egocentrics.

We are living in the worst of all possible worlds in which there is still hope.

Adin Steinsaltz

Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:
Herod is his name.

Charles Causley

In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Winifred Sackville Stoner

A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through.

Ultimately, human intentionality is the most powerful evolutionary force on this planet.

I often think of a poem as a door that opens into a room where I want to go. But to go in here is to enter where my own suffering exists as an almost unheard low note in the music, amplified, almost unbearable.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

The one question that ought to be asked on a teaching application is: do you love children?

Adults ask little boys what they want to do when they grow up. They ask little girls where they got that pretty dress. We don't care what women do with their education.

What is important is for each individual to order her life so that she becomes a happy, creative person.

Millicent Carey McIntosh

The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.

Nadezhda Mandelstam

As long as the "woman's work" that some men do is socially devalued, as long as it is defined as woman's work, as long as it's tacked onto a "regular" work day, men who share it are likely to develop the same jagged mouth and frazzled hair as the coffee-mug mom. The image of the new man is like the image of the supermom: it obscures the strain.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

The arts are the rain forests of society. They produce the oxygen of freedom, and they are the early warning system when freedom is in danger.

Librarians need to focus not on individual, physical libraries but on the larger networks–physical and digital–of which their libraries are part.