Nel Noddings Quotes

If you want young people to take right and wrong seriously, you must put them in the presence of people who take right and wrong seriously.

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

The teacher who would be true to his mission and accomplish the most good, must give prominence to moral as well as intellectual instruction.

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

The good man is the teacher of the bad, And the bad is the material from which the good may learn. He who does not value the teacher, Or greatly care for the material, Is greatly deluded although he may be learned. Such is the essential mystery.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

The great want of our race is perfect educators to train new-born minds, who are infallible teachers of what is right and true.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Tutors who make youth learned do not always make them virtuous.

For children to take morality seriously they must be in the presence of adults who take morality seriously. And with their own eyes they must see adults take morality seriously.

The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Although children are good and well born, vice will blight them if they are not well educated.

I think there's a moral imperative when you're writing fictional heroes to give characters who somehow give us something to aspire to as opposed to dragging them down to our level.

I'd like to write a series that, in an adventurous and fun way, teaches kids a way to discern between good and evil, to establish a foundation on moral absolutes.

Duty is a better guide than stars or statutes.

Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.

Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but it the mirror will not wash your face.

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

Outside his office my father had a framed copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to his son's teacher, translated into Pashto. It is a very beautiful letter, full of good advice. Teach him, if you can, the wonder of books...But also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun, and the flowers on a green hillside, it says. Teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat.