Educator Quotes

The virtues which keep this world sweet and the faithfulness which keeps it steadfast are chiefly those of the average man. The danger of the two-talent man is that he will be content with mediocrity.

Walter Russell Bowie

A national evil requires a national remedy; let not this any longer be delayed: let your minds expand, free from every narrow principle, and let the public good become the sole object of your united Christian efforts.

Joseph Lancaster

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.

In the presence of such weird and wondrous beauty [the night heavens], the tenderest sentiments of the heart are aroused. A feeling of awe and reverence, of softened melancholy mingled with a thought of God, comes over us, and awakens the better nature within us.

Joel Dorman Steele

Nervous exhaustion from mental overwork is most often due to neglect of this rule and the brain worker should limit his regular day's work to a reasonable number of hours per day and those when the brain is at its best.

Maurice Bigelow

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.

Grace! 'tis a charming Sound,
Harmonious to my Ear!
Heav'n with the Echo shall resound,
And all the Earth shall hear.

Philip Doddridge

We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue's other and more precise name.

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

Poverty is mean and degrading to the human spirit, whereas a life of conscious simplicity can have both a beauty and a functional integrity that elevates the human spirit.

Teaching is mostly listening, and learning is mostly telling.

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.

We desire justice, and justice has never been obtained in haste and strong feeling.

Walter Van Tilburg Clark

There are people who are excitable by nature and allow themselves to become angry for the most trivial of reasons. Judo can help such people learn to control themselves. Through training, they quickly realize that anger is a waste of energy, that it has only negative effects on the self and others.

A cardinal principle in systems theory is that all parties that have a stake in a system should be represented in its management.

Malcolm Knowles

We are to have one flag, and on it the words: Holy and Pure Republic.

Much depends upon us for the help of our color—more than many are aware. If we are lazy and idle, the enemies of freedom plead it as a cause why we ought not to be free, and say we are better in a state of servitude, and that giving us our liberty would be an injury to us, and by such conduct we strengthen the bands of oppression and keep many in bondage who are more worthy than ourselves.

Richard Allen (bishop)

Teach your children to listen carefully and to speak thoughtfully. The best way to teach this is to listen carefully and speak thoughtfully to your children, from the time they are babies. Take their questions and ideas seriously... learning to speak and listen as if our words matter is fundamental to education. Dialogue is not the same as mindless chatter. Above all, listen, listen, and listen to your kids.

Grace Llewellyn

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.

Every one's abilities may be increased or strengthened by a kind of culture.

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

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.

If no other consideration had convinced me of the value of the Christian life, the Christ like work which the Church of all denominations in America has done during the last 35 years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian.

Booker T. Washington

He comes to the teacher with his eyes filled with a thousand pictures, but they are ignored, and he is robbed of them one by one until at last the beauty of this world fades from his sight and it is changed to a vale of tears.

Wilbur S. Jackman