John Hurt Quotes

Man, I hated school. I'd stare at the buttons on the teacher's shirt the whole class.

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire.

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

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

In my head, I'm still a teacher. I miss the kids.

I love working with teachers and principals; they are my heroes. They are very dedicated to children, and it's very impactful.

I worked as a barista and a kindergarten teacher. I really love kids and enjoyed every minute of being in a kindergarten.

I am inclined to think that one's education has been in vain if one fails to learn that most schoolmasters are idiots.

Most naughtiness arises because the children are bored and lack a relationship with the teacher.

An educator's most important task, one might say his holy duty, is to see to it that no child is discouraged at school, and that a child who enters school already discouraged regains his self-confidence through his school and his teacher. This goes hand in hand with the vocation of the educator, for education is possible only with children who look hopefully and joyfully upon the future.

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.

Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous YES.

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.

I'm a high school teacher. I'm someone who stumbles my way through, leads with my chin in some cases, leads with my heart in all cases.

I was very bored at school. I found it very easy and slow and grey. My teachers didn't really know how to handle me, because I was very sarcastic. I was over-confident, arrogant, a typical youngest child. I went through periods of withdrawing into myself and school psychologists tried to figure me out, work out why I didn't fit in. I found that irritating, too.

I've never been a teacher in my life.

Educational bureaucracies dull a child's questing sensitivity. The young must be dampened down. Never let them know how good they can be. That brings change. Spend lots of committee time talking about how to deal with exceptional students. Don't spend any time dealing with how the conventional teacher feels threatened by emerging talents and squelches them because of a deep-seated desire to feel superior and safe in a safe environment.

I have always felt that the true text-book for the pupil is his teacher

The toughest thing for a homeschooler is the same as for a school teacher - shifting from a weak tea vision of math being grinding calculations to a rich frothy mug of math as an active way of thinking.

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children.

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.

I grew up in a school system . . . where nobody understood the meaning of learning disorder. In the West Indies, I was constantly being physically abused because the whipping of students was permitted.