Education Quotes

On the TV and in the newspapers all we hear and read is 'live your life or the terrorists win' and it sounds great, I’m all for that, except my kids won’t ask for a bathroom pass because the faculty facilities are on the first floor of the building and the MPs patrolling the second floor won’t go downstairs on their shift—so I’ve got middle school kids afraid to take a piss because there might be a soldier in the stall next to them carrying a loaded M- 16—but hell yes, I’m all for 'live your life' and screw the terrorists, and screw all the countries who harbor and support them. I’m on board with that, except I’ve got these kids who stay home now, because they’re scared riding a bus with soldiers carrying guns, knowing that one soldier isn’t enough, so there’s a military truck full of soldiers with even bigger guns following the bus 'just in case.

~ Tucker Elliot

In my life I’ve been very lucky to travel around the world and see students and teachers in nearly two dozen countries—but the most awe-inspiring experience I’ve ever had was two years after 9/11 when I had the chance to attend a conference in Manhattan and personally meet many of the heroic teachers who persevered under conditions that in our worst nightmares we could never have imagined. In my opinion there’s not been nearly enough written about those teachers, and I hope that changes soon.

~ Tucker Elliot

Korea is often called the “Land of the Morning Calm.” It’s a country where you notice the filth and the smog on your first trip and you can’t imagine why you ever thought it was a good idea to visit. Then you meet the people and you walk among their culture and you get a sense there is something deeper beneath the surface, and before you know it, the smog doesn’t matter and the filth is gone—and in its place there is incredible beauty. The sun rises first over Japan, and as Korea is waiting for the earth to spin, for streaks of light to brighten its eastern sky, in that quiet moment there is a calmness that makes Korea the most beautiful country in the world.

~ Tucker Elliot

The only thing worse than his arrogance was his incompetence. He was a bully, behaving like an ass. I saw Angel though, not him. The memorial was right there, just outside the window. It’s in the flowers, and it makes me angry. Angel liked to sit on the couch, watch TV, eat chips. She hated outside. Maybe I should have been a bully and an ass to Angel’s parents. Maybe Angel and Grace would still be alive if I’d behaved like this piece of shit teacher.

~ Tucker Elliot

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.

~ Tucker Elliot

I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It’s not so easy, moving forward.

~ Tucker Elliot

Ahead in the distance we could see the main gate, but there was a sea of cars, none moving, people standing, milling around, waiting nervously, perhaps fearfully, as heavily armed MPs and military working dogs searched every square inch of every vehicle, searched every bag on every person, all the while keeping a vigilant eye on the long alley we were stuck in, and on the hundreds of rooftops that overlooked that alley, wary but aware that there were people out there who would gladly hurt us again if given the chance.

~ Tucker Elliot

In Korea I’d been so afraid that Sami would lose her dad. She did, but she didn’t get a flag. He went to Doha, then to Baghdad, then to Kabul, then to someplace else, and then to a different someplace else, on and on. He’d come home, leave again, come home, leave again, until one day he came home a different person altogether. Sami lost Angel, lost her family, and then she lost herself.

~ Tucker Elliot

There are more good people than bad people, and overall there’s more that’s good in the world than there is that’s bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.

~ Tucker Elliot

DPRK translates to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—and if the words Democratic and Republic sound like a good thing, well, it’s oxymoronic because the Korea we’re talking about here is the communist one in the North, and when I said the pastor’s father was their guest, what I really meant is he was shot down, captured, tortured, and held prisoner by a depraved enemy in what today can only be described as a failed state.

~ Tucker Elliot

The look of a smug teacher is priceless.

~ Tucker Elliot

For your own security it’s imperative you blend in with the native population.

~ Tucker Elliot

It felt like we were reliving the first day of the school year, when students and teachers do the get-to-know-you dance—teachers tell students something about who they are, students pretend to care, and then vice-versa.

~ Tucker Elliot

Fun is never gone because life is fun.

~ Debasish Mridha

Happiness is the gap between loving and longing.

~ Debasish Mridha

Have an appreciating eye to enjoy the beauty of sky.

~ Debasish Mridha

Think of the things killing us as a nation: narcotic drugs, brainless competition, dishonesty, greed, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all -- lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy -- all of these are addictions of dependent personalities. That is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

~ John Taylor Gatto

The simplest description is that Unschooling means a way of bringing up children using free play and child-directed activity to develop the child's own individual talents and creativity by supportively following up the child's own interests – without coercion, compulsion, manipulation, regimentation, constant testing and grading and rank-ordering, or top-down authoritarianism.

~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Teachers achievements does not requires their positions. Because real teacher must not focus in certificates but instead the experiences he encounter to the learners,that he touches the future he teach.

~ Adoniemar

One of the best things that I wanted to become a teacher is that, I don't want to be forgotten.

~ Adoniemar

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and think critically. Intelligence plus character, that is the goal of a true education.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

we are all born educated, but we need education to be educated

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.

~ John Holt

education without inspiration is only a recipe for desperation

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Children are not only extremely good at learning, they are much better at it than we are.

~ John Holt

The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough. We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher.

~ John Holt

By educating the young, we are building a liberating potential force indirectly.

~ Auliq Ice

Based on our badly borrowed misunderstanding of the words ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ we seemto have become blinded by the dominant intellectual ideology of our times, according to which schools as secular organizations are supposed to not have anything to do with matters of the spirit. Education has, therefore, become concerned only with matters of material life (eventually leading to commodification)... This dichotomy between 'education for social success' and education for spirit' must go if we want to make Indian Education more relevant for the future of India. Education needs to become more integral, more complete through a meaningful synthesis of the two.

~ Beloo Mehra

Answer all the questions. Question all the answers.

~ Laurie Gray

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Fill your mind before you empty your mouth.

~ Habeeb Akande

During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare’s interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.

~ Jonathan Bate

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

~ Laura Bates

By the time you have a platform for saying what you want, you’ve already become part of the system. It’s how it works.

~ Ingela Bohm

Luck always favors those who are bold.

~ Debasish Mridha

To change yourself, let go of what you are and accept what you want to be.

~ Debasish Mridha

If I want to be anything, I want to be a messenger of peace.

~ Debasish Mridha

Has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you're not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from the outside. In fact it's exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...

~ William Gaddis

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition.

~ C.s. Lewis

Love those wrongdoers, they need it more than you.

~ Alfred Hitchcock