Teaching
Favorite Selections from ToInspire.com

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see. - Ayn Rand

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation. - John F. Kennedy

Education, n. One of the few things a fellow is willing to pay for and not get. - Leonard L. Levinson

The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint. - Sir William Osler

Only when we have something to value, will we have something to evaluate.. and we cannot value something that we cannot share, exchange and examine. - Lee Shulman

Failing to plan is a plan to fail. - Effie Jones

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

The goal of education is to replace an empty mind with an open mind. - Malcolm Forbes

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

America's future walks through the doors of our schools every day. - Mary Jean LeTendre

The two basic processes of education are knowing and valuing. - Robert J. Havighurst

Believe nothing merely because you have been told it... Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to and take it as your guide. - Buddhist Aphorism

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results. - John Dewey

To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced. - Abba Felix

If we are to remain preeminent in transforming knowledge into economic value, America's system of higher education must remain the world's leader in generating scientific and technological breakthrough, and in meeting the challenge to educate workers. - Alan Greenspan

The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but from work that is unworthy of him. - Maria Montessori

The principal goal of education... should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things... men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers. - Jean Piaget

I feel sorry for teachers who are required to spell out precise “learning objectives” long before a class begins so that they can measure their own “effectiveness.” I feel sorry for their students, too. Education dominated by preconceived images of what must be learned can hardly be educational. Authentic teaching and learning requires a live encounter with the unexpected. An element of suspense and surprise, an evocation of that which we did not know until it happened. If these elements are not present, we may be training or indoctrinating students, but we are not educating them. In any arena of action-rearing children, counseling people, repairing machines, writing books-right action depends on yielding our images of particular outcomes to the organic realities of ourselves, the other, and the adventure of action itself. (from 'The Active Life') - Parker Palmer

Of course there is matter for remark in poems. Nobody denies that. But it must be solemnly laid on everybody in this world to make his own observations and remarks. That’s what we mean by thinking, and that’s about all we mean. A teacher says to a pupil “Watch me notice a few things in the next few months: let’s see you notice a few things too.” (from letter to Louis Untermeyer, from Ann Arbor, MI, dated May 17, 1926) - Robert Frost

A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves. - Herbie Hancock

The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does. - Mark Van Doren

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. - Confucius

One day we will realize that big hearts will bring us more peace than big weapons. - Malathy Drew

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. - Dr. Martin Luther King

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. - Henry Ford