Quotes
Teaching Latin to someone like me in high school was somewhat like trying to teach a pig to dance. It's a waste of the teacher's time and it irritates the pig.
We're all born with curiosity, but at some point, school usually manages to knock that out of us. ...[M]y main responsibility as a teacher isn't to convey facts, but to rekindle that lost enthusiasm for asking questions.
The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.
Hard as it is to believe, in the entire world there is not a single faculty in which a degree is offered in the study of psychic injuries in childhood.
“For a human being, nothing comes naturally,” said Grumman. “We have to learn everything we do.”
By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.
With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know.
"Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!" The reply, of course, is: "That's just it."
Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.
Like most chairmen, he teaches only one class of Seniors; the most experienced teachers are frequently promoted right out of the classroom!
This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.
A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.
