Nat Hentoff Quotes

I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student - and not to a test.

I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education, I believe teachers are.

America's best teachers are always looking for new ways to bring learning to life.

I believe acting and teaching are not so far apart. As a teacher, you educate. And films educate, too, but they do it in a massive way.

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.

Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

I always remember liking school.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

Teaching can be learning, especially if student curiosity with the question 'What's going on here?' can be elicited.

To acquire behavior, the student must engage in behavior

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

Education is taken for granted. Teaching shops are different from building character.

In schools, if you go to teach kids with less interest in music the nuances of music, they feel deviated, as it is very technical. But teaching them songs, to begin with, creates a natural desire in them to know the other country, their eating habits, the way they dress up, how they look, and other things.

This is a country that I love and that I believe in, but at the same time also believe that you should, as a part of this country, have the right to be able to talk very clearly about the issues that are happening, going on.

He is not likely to learn who is not willing to be taught; for the learner has something to do, as well as the teacher.

We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.

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

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?

I've opened up my school in California in a beautiful facility on Ventura Boulevard. I'm always in heaven when I'm doing my classes.

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

They [teachers] beat it right out of me. Or they beat it into me and educated it out of me. I don't know; that's an interesting question. The Catholic schools required work, so I think that may have been where the work ethic came from, in answer to the question of how my character may have been shaped.