Albert Shanker Quotes

Teachers know how to improve education.

Educators are still spending way too much time trying to control what kids learn, bending the content to their own purposes, hoping beyond hope to change - by using technology - but not change too much.

One thing I'm hearing a lot is from teachers who have felt that there's something wrong with the extreme group learning, but felt like they couldn't say that out loud. And apparently the discussion is now opening up. I think change is going to be a long time coming.

I'm not one of those who thinks the only way to fix what's wrong with American education is to throw more money at it. We also need to do it much better.

Students Are Not Widgets. Schools Are Not Factories.

When you have teachers saying, 'I don't have enough time for hands-on activities,' we need to rethink the way we do education.

One of the biggest reasons that teachers have trouble with student-centered learning is that they have to give over a level of control to the kids. And, when you do that, you can have chaos, or you can have high levels of learning. Often, teachers are afraid of the chaos.

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.

I was very, very unhappy with even the so-called very elite schools. The one thing I've always done every day with my children is to watch what they do at school, and I was always a bit unhappy with the academic program. It was a kind of hit and miss.

Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

I taught public school for 26 years, but I just can't do it anymore. For years I asked the school board to let me teach a curriculum that doesn't hurt kids, but they always had other fish to fry. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything, but blind obedience.

Change the way we teach; Empower teachers

I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.

Many children struggle in schools... because the way they are being taught is incompatible with the way they learn.

I believe that our teachers need more freedom to be creative in the classroom in order to maximize the time students spend learning, not the time they spend taking tests.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.

I think a lot of teachers want to talk about how to continually improve performance.

I do look upon the secretary of education's primary responsibility as the quality of education that - and improving the education that every child in American public schools receives.

When you have schools that are operating in the 20th century, and we're trying to prepare our children for the 21st century, even those children know they are not educated in the right way.

Of all the excellent teachers of college English whom I have known I have never discovered one who knew precisely what he was doing. Therein have lain their power and their charm.

It is sentimentalism to assume that the teaching of life can always be fitted to the child's interests, just as it is empty formalism to force the child to parrot the formulas of adult society. Interests can be created and stimulated.

I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little knowledge of physiology. ... The instruction must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching.

The thing we need to work on as a country is our educational system. To me, that is something that our generation needs to be focused on. To make sure that for our next generation, every child - no matter what background, no matter what ethnicity, no matter whether they're whatever gender - that they are all educated to have real equal opportunity. That's number one for me. But I have no question that if it's not our generation that will make sure that that happens that it will be our children's generation.

We think it's about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. We need teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can communicate with kids.