Paul Beatty Quotes

I worked in a number of high schools in New York, and I wound up at Stuyvesant High School, which is known nationally for producing brilliant scientists and mathematicians, but I had writing classes. I thought I was teaching. They thought I was teaching, but I was learning.

You can't get any movement larger than five people without including at least one flippin idiot.

Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.

When you have more than two people working together, it gets a bit unfocused as an idea.

I call myself a teacher because they want me to call myself a teacher, but actually, what I'm doing is I'm studying.

The teacher that I was for decades, and that I still am in a certain way, wondered what was meant by the word education. I was truly dumbfounded at the very thought of dealing with such an essential and extensive subject.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

Education is, in the end, about individual interactions and about learning.

I don't like the five-person group dynamic. I just never have. It doesn't make sense to me that six people would just sit in a circle and say, 'Now I want approval,' 'Now I want approval,' 'Now I want approval.' 'I have something funny to say,' 'No, I have something funny to say, me!' It's hard to make plans.

A disciple...can never imitate his guide's steps. You have your own way of living your life, of dealing with problems, and of winning. Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.

During my school visits, I really enjoy the feedback I get from them much more than anything I might tell say to them.

You see, no one can teach anybody. The teacher spoils everything by thinking that he is teaching. Thus Vedanta says that within man is all knowledge-even in a boy it is so-and it requires only an awakening, and that much is the work of a teacher.

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.

What I've learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means "to pull from." Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stop them from learning.

By leaving a student to himself he may... be led to undertake matters above his strength, but the trial will at least have this advantage: it will discover to himself his own deficiencies and this discovery alone is a very considerable acquisition.

INSTRUCTORS CAN impart a fraction of the teaching. It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of the Art of Peace are brought to life.

Part of teaching is helping people create themselves.

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

It takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning.

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true. You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers. The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.