|
|
 |
A number of teaching and learning
centers have begun collections of quotations. Snow
College in Utah even maintains a database searchable by
source, author, etc. The following have been gleaned from
these and other sources, including collections at Western
Kentucky University and the University of Minnesota. In
most cases the quotations are given without specific
citation to the source in which it first appeared. This
will annoy scholars and be of no concern to toastmasters.
If you know the source of a quotation given here, please
let us know so that we can help make the material
valuable to everyone.
The quotations range widely. Some seem wise, others
sappy. In the right setting, each becomes a rhetorical
jewel.
If you have a favorite quotation on these topics,
submit it to Lynda Harris Lilly at mailto:ntlfsupport@aol.com
for possible inclusion on this page.
-- James Rhem
QUOTES
On Teaching
- I have read somewhere or other,--in Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, I think,--that history is
philosophy teaching by examples.
- On the Study and Use of History. Letter 2.
- Viscount Bolingbroke. 1678-1751
- "At present the universities are as
uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a
clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a
Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering
prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids,
you must grow forests."
- (Arrowsmith, 1967, pp. 58-59)
- Arrowsmith, W. (1967). "The future of
teaching." In C. B. T. Lee (Ed.), Improving
college teaching (pp. 57-71). Washington, DC:
American Council on Education.
- Professors known as outstanding lecturers do two
things; they use a simple plan and many examples.
- W. McKeachie
- Thought flows in terms of stories - stories about
events, stories about people, and stories about
intentions and achievements. The best teachers
are the best story tellers. We learn in the form
of stories.
- Frank Smith
- Any genuine teaching will result, if successful,
in someone's knowing how to bring about a better
condition of things than existed earlier.
- John Dewey
- Laurence Houseman once said, "A saint is one
who makes goodness attractive." Surely, a
great teacher does the same thing for education.
- John Trimble
- Many instructional arrangements seem
"contrived," but there is nothing wrong
with that. It is the teacher's function to
contrive conditions under which students learn.
It has always been the task of formal education
to set up behavior which would prove useful or
enjoyable later in a student'slife.
- B.F. Skinner
- The teachers who get "burned out" are
not the ones who are constantly learning, which
can be exhilarating, but those who feel they must
stay in control and ahead of the students at all
times.
- Frank Smith
- The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate
"aparently ordinary" people to unusual
effort. The tough proplem is not in identifying
winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary
people.
- K. Patricia Cross
- Teachers who cannot keep students involved and
excited for several hours in the classroom should
not be there.
- John Roueche
- Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
- Aristotle
- We teach what we like to learn and the reason
many people go into teaching is vicariously to
reexperience the primary joy experienced the
first time they learned something they loved.
- Stephen Brookfield
- The best learners... often make the worst
teachers. They are, in a very real sense,
perceptually challenged. They cannot imagine what
it must be like to struggle to learn something
that comes so naturally to them.
- Stephen Brookfield
- TEACHING: the earth doesn't move every time, but
when it does, what a RUSH!
- Cameron Beatty
- A good teacher is better than a spectacular
teacher. Otherwise the teacher outshines the
teachings.
- The Tao of Teaching
- Effective teaching may be the hardest job there
is.
- William Glasser
- In what may as well be starkly labelled smug
satisfaction, an amazing 94% [of college
instructors] rate themselves as above average
teachers, and 68% rank themselves in the top
quarter of teaching performances.
- K Patricia Cross
(from the Western Kentucky
University collection)
For an even larger, sortable colletion
(updated 3/17/03) go to
http://atech2.wku.edu/ctl/Quotes/
The Process of Teaching
- Teaching = helping someone else learn.
- L. Dee Fink
- Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and
three-fourths theatre.
- Gail Godwin
- The educator must above all understand how to
wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the
future, not of the present.
- Ellen Key, 1911
- Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember.
Involve me and I understand.
- "Chinese proverb"
- Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give
you one corner, and it is for you to find the
other three.
- Confucius
- Teaching is truth mediated by personality.
- Phyllis Brooks
- The true teacher defends his pupils against his
own personal influence.
- A. Bronson Alcott
- Teaching is the achievement of shared meaning.
- D.B. Gowin, 1981, Educating.
- The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Art of Teaching
- It's not what is poured into a student that
counts, but what is planted.
- Linda Conway
- A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to
be filled.
- Plutarch
- Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And
things unknown proposed as things forgot.
- Alexander Pope
- The vanity of teaching often tempteth a man to
forget he is a blockhead.
- George Savile
On Being a Teacher
- Setting an example is not the main means of
influencing another, it is the only means.
- Albert Einstein
- It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make
his pupils think, but to make them think right,
and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with
the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and
emotion, the more admirably he performs his
function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no
demerit in a man paid to make asses of his
customers.
- H.L. Mencken
- No man can be a good teacher unless he has
feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and
a genuine desire to impart to them what he
himself believes to be of value.
- Bertrand Russell
- If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in
his office at one time, all of whom had different
needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there
and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer,
or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them
all with professional excellence for nine months,
then he might have some conception of the
classroom teacher's job.
- Donald D. Quinn
On the "Teacher"
- Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
- Goethe
- Students ratings collected a year apart from the
same students correlated significantly, though
the later ratings tended to rate the teacher as
less effective than those collected at the end of
the course.
- John Centra
- Only some 12% of a national sample of almost
400,000 teachers received less then average
ratings from students.
- John Centra
- The most important knowledge teachers need to do
good work is a knowledge of how students are
experiencing learning and perceiving their
teacher's actions.
- Steven Brookfield
On Learning
- What is "learning"?
-
- "In its broadest sense, learning can be
defined as a process of progressive change from
ignorance to knowledge, from inability to
competence, and from indifference to
understanding....In much the same manner,
instruction-or education-can be defined as the
means by which we systematize the situations,
conditions, tasks materials, and opportunities by
which learners acquire new or different ways of
thinking, feeling, and doing."
- Cameron Fincher, "Learning Theory and
Research," in Teaching and Learning in
the College Classroom, edited by Kenneth A.
Feldman and Michael Paulson, Ashe Reader Series,
Needham, MA: Ginn Press, 1994.
- "Most models [of learning] assume that the
purpose of learning is to incorporate new
information or skills into the learner's existing
knowledge structure and to make that knowledge
accessible. . . . Learning begins with the need
for some motivation, an intention to learn. The
learner must then concentrate attention on the
important aspects of what is to be learned and
differentiate them from noise in the environment.
While those important aspects are being
identified, the learner accesses the prior
knowledge that already exists in memory, because
a key to learning is connecting what is known to
what is being learned. New information must be
processed, structured, and connected in such a
way as to be accessible in the future; this
process is known as encoding. The deeper the
processing of the information in terms of its
underlying organization, the better the learning
and later retrieval of that information. This
processing requires active involvement . The
learner must verify an understanding of the
structure by receiving feedback, from the
internal and external environments, on the
encoding choices made.
- Marilla Svinicki, Anastasia Hagen and Debra
Meyer, "How Research on Learning Strengthens
Instruction," in Teaching on Solid Ground,
Robert Menges and Maryellen Weimer, Jossey-Bass,
1996.
- "Learning is a social process that occurs
through interpersonal interaction within a
cooperative context. Individuals, working
together, construct shared understandings and
knowledge."
- David Johnson, Roger Johnson and Karl Smith, Active
Learning: Cooperation in the College Classroom,
Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co., 1991.
- "Where I grew up, learning was a collective
activity. But when I got to school and tried to
share learning with other students that was
called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear
message to me that learning was a highly
individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My
working class experience . . . was
disparaged."
- Henry A Giroux, Border Crossings, NY:
Routledge, 1992.
- "There is no difference between living and
learning . . . it is impossible and misleading
and harmful to think of them as being separate.
Teaching is human communication and like all
communication, elusive and difficult...we must be
wary of the feeling that we know what we are
doing in class. When we are most sure of what we
are doing, we may be closest to being a
bore."
- John Holt, What Do I Do Monday? NY:
Dutton, 1970.
- "Education is the acquisition of the art of
the utilization of knowledge. This an art very
difficult to impart. We must beware of what I
will call "inert ideas" that is to say,
ideas that are merely received into the mind
without being utilized or tested or thrown into
fresh combinations."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Aims of Education and
other Essays, NY: MacMillan, 1924.
- "I entered the classroom with the conviction
that it was crucial for me and every other
student to be an active participant, not a
passive consumer...[a conception of] education as
the practice of freedom.... education that
connects the will to know with the will to
become. Learning is a place where paradise can be
created."
- Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress, NY:
Routledge, 1994.
- "Learning is not so much an additive
process, with new learning simply piling up on
top of existing knowledge, as it is an active,
dynamic process in which the connections are
constantly changing and the structure
reformatted."
- K. Patricia Cross
- I think we need to train up a new kind of
educational leader [who] will need fundamental
preparation in the humanities of education, those
studies of history, philosophy and literature
that will enable him to develop a clear and
compelling vision of education and of its
relation to American life. These latter studies
have been under something of a cloud in recent
decades because their immediate utility is
difficult to demonstrate. But it is their
ultimate utility, that really matters, for only
as educators begin to think deeply about the ends
of learning will the politics of popular
education go beyond mere competition for dollars
and cents and become what Plato realized it must
ideally be--a constant reaching for the good
society.
- Cremin
- Since there is no single set of abilities running
throughout human nature, there is no single
curriculum which all should undergo. Rather, the
schools should teach everything that anyone is
interested in learning.
- John Dewey
- Learning from programmed information always hides
reality behind a screen.
- Ivan Illich
- Memorization is what we resort to when what we
are learning makes no sense.
- Anonymous
- It is what we think we know already that often
prevents us from learning.
- Claude Bernard
- Sometimes the last thing learners need is for
their preferred learning style to be affirmed.
Agreeing to let people learn only in a way that
feels comfortable and familiar can restrict
seriously their chance for development.
- Steven Brookfield
- A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink
deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
- Every act of conscious learning requires the
willingness to suffer an injury to one's
self-esteem. That is why young children, before
they are aware of their own self-importance learn
so easily; and why older persons, especially if
vain or important, cannot learn at all.
- Thomas Szasz, 1973
- "Students learn what they care about . .
.," Stanford Ericksen has said, but Goethe
knew something else: "In all things we learn
only from those we love." Add to that
Emerson's declaration: "the secret of
education lies in respecting the pupil." and
we have a formula something like this:
"Students learn what they care about, from
people they care about and who, they know, care
about them . . ."
- Barbara Harrell Carson, 1996, Thiry Years of
Stories
- The lasting measure of good teaching is what the
individual student learns and carries away.
- Barbara Harrell Carson, 1996, Thiry Years of
Stories
On Education
- Cognitive skills either exist in such profusion
(through schooling) or are so easily developed on
the job that they are not a criterion for hiring.
Thus the education-related workers attributes
that employers willingly pay for must be
predominantly affective
characteristics--personality traits, attitudes,
modes of self-presentation and motivation.
- H. Gintis
- Soap and education are not as sudden as a
massacre, but they are more deadly in the long
run.
- Mark Twain
- It seems to me that at this time we need
education in the obvious more than investigation
of the obscure.
- OliverWendell Holmes Jr.
- All education springs from some image of the
future. If the image of the future held by a
society is grossly inaccurate, its education
system will betray its youth.
- Alvin Toffler
- The main hope of a nation lies in the proper
education of its youth.
- Erasmus
- Our best chance for happiness is education.
- Mark VanDorn
- Information cannot replace education.
- Imparato and Itarari
- Two professions most notably regarded as filled
with "nonlisteners" are medicine and
education!
- Earl Koile
- Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind
with an open one.
- Malcom S. Forbes
- Education is the ability to think clearly, act
well in the world of work and to appreciate life.
- Brigham Young
- The great end of education is to discipline
rather than to furnish the mind; To train it to
the use of its own powers rather than to fill it
with the accumulation of others.
- Tryon Edwards
- Education is the point at which we decide whether
we love the world enough to assume responsibility
for it and by the same token to save it from that
ruin, which, except for renewal, except for the
coming of the new and the young, would be
inevitable. An education, too, is where we decide
whether we love our children enough not to expel
them from our world and leave them to their own
devices, nor to strike from their hands their
choice of undertaking something new, something
unforseen by us, but to prepare them in advance
for the task of renewing a common world.
- Hannah Arendt, Teaching as Leading
- To be able to be caught up into the world of
thought--that is being educated.
- Edith Hamilton
- Education is the ability to listen to almost
anything without losing your temper.
- Robert Frost
- The highest result of education is tolerance.
- Helen Keller
- Education is the art of making man ethical.
- Georg Hegel, 1821
- Not perfection as a final goal, but the
ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing,
refining is the aim of living.
- John Dewey
- Education is not preparation for life; education
is life itself.
- John Dewey
- Education today, more than ever before, must see
clearly the dual objectives: Education for living
andeducating for making a living.
- James Mason Wood
- What we must decide is perhaps how we are
valuable, rather than how valuable we are.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Every uneducated person is a caricature of
himself.
- Friedrich Schlegel, 1798
- What sculpture is to a block of marble, education
is to an human soul.
- Joseph Addison, 1711
- How can we help students to understand that the
tragedy of life is not death; the tragedy is to
die with commitments undefined and convictions
undeclared and service unfulfilled?
- Vachel Lindsay
- Life is what happens when you are making other
plans.
- John Lennon (1940-1980)
- Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today
as you were a year ago.
- Berenson Bernard
- Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know
nothing; education is a progressive discovery of
our own ignorance.
- Will Durant
The Snow College database of quotes on teaching,
learning, and education, etc. may be found at http://iac.snow.edu/Tango/Tango.acgi$/quote?function=form
Thanks to all who have (and will!) contribute to
these pages.
|
