Quotations on Teaching and Education

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
--Chinese Proverb

Teaching that begins with questions is both a moral and a pedagogical choice. A teacher teaches with questions because she or he believes that it is a better way to teach, and a better way to be a teacher. Yet to succeed at this, the questions must be real questions: questions that puzzle, confuse, and interest.
--Nicholas C. Burbles, essay: "Aporia: Webs, Passages, Getting Lost, and Learning to Go On"

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.
--John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.
--Anatole France

We think of our efficient teachers with a sense of recognition, but those who touched our humanity we remember with gratitude. Learning is the essential mineral, but warmth is the life-element for the child's soul, no less than for the growing plant.
--Carl Gustav Jung, "The Gifted Child" - Collected Works, vol 17

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
--Thomas Carlyle

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
--Anatole France

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. Our requirements for world leadership, our hopes for economic growth, and the demands of citizenship itself in an era such as this all require the maximum development of every young American's capacity. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Special message to the Congress on Education, February 20 1961

As we approach the new millennium, we see how much remains to be done to give our young and future generations a better world to live in: a more peaceful society with a healthier, cleaner environment and a pattern of sustainable development which seeks to eradicate poverty. Education is the single most powerful means to improve the quality of life... the single most powerful weapon against poverty and intolerance. Education builds a culture of peace ... it empowers human beings, both young and adult, to be effective in their chosen sphere of activity ... education in its essence, opens doors to both personal and social development.
--Federico Mayor, Address at the second international congress on technical and vocational education, Seoul South Korea, April 26 1999

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
--Jean Piaget, quoted in Education for Democracy, Proceedings from the Cambridge School Conference on Progressive Education

-A Student is the most important person ever in this school...in person, on the telephone, or by mail.
-A Student is not dependent on us...we are dependent on the Student.
-A Student is not an interruption of our work.. the student is the purpose of it. We are not doing a favor by serving the student... the student is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
-A Student is a person who brings us his or her desire to learn. It is our job to handle each student in a manner which is beneficial to the student and ourselves.
--William W. Purkey, What is a Student?

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
--Alvin Toffler

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
--Aristotle

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.
--Bill Beattie

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought -- that is to be educated.
--Edith Hamilton

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
--Epictetus

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
--Henry B. Adams

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
--Lord Brougham

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you don't consider your students to be human beings.
--Lou Ann Walker

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
--Nelson Mandela

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
--Will Durant