20th-century Educator Quotes

When we say "Peace on earth," we can sing about it, preach about it, or pray about it, but if we have not internalized the mythology to make it happen inside of us, then it will not be.

I've been putting out sexually explicit images of myself for years. I know this sounds bizarre, but somehow it makes me feel safer.

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.

A moment was not a single moment at all, but rather an infinite number of different moments, depending on who was seeing things and how.

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

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.

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

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

It required an act of profound intellectual audacity to assign a name and hence a symbol to all that nothingness. Nothing, nada, Zip, Zero, 0.

David Berlinski

You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you'll only attain the average and you'll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average.

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.

Growing up means leaving home and becoming a self supporting adult. I think this the hardest task any human being hast to face.

John Bradshaw (author)

Highly resilient people are flexible, adapt to new circumstances quickly, and thrive in constant change. Most important, they expect to bounce back and feel confident that they will. They have a knack for creating good luck out of circumstances that many others see as bad luck.

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

Charles Causley

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

Millicent Carey McIntosh

I'm much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don't work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.

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

You're dying right now. Right this minute.' He looked at his watch, said, 'Right this second,' then tapped it with his finger. 'See there? That second passed. It's gone. Not gonna come again. And while I'm talking to you, every second I'm talking, a second is passing. Gone. Count them up. Count them down. They're gone. Each one bringing you closer to your dying time.

Whatever I do today is the whole continuum of my experience. Like John Dewey said in his book 'Art as Experience,' you can't separate experience from the work of art. So, if I write for the symphony today, you're listening to everything that's happened to me since I was 18 years old.

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.

ever wonder where the circle came from
or who were the first people to use the triangle?
who were the original cultivators of the earth, who used
water of the nile to power minds and machines? what people
created music from instrument and voice and viewed the
building of cities as art and science? who were the
first to love because love contained the secrets of tomorrow?
look at yourselves.

Haki R. Madhubuti

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

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

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

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.