Bel Kaufman Quotes

I would say this to my students all the time, it's about 30% you as the teacher and 70% about them. They tend to think that their role is to be the baby bird in a nest and you're going to feed them? They're going to feed themselves, or they're going to starve.

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it's an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment.

Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

I soon gave up instruction for self-teaching.

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.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

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

All learning is in the learner, not in the teacher.

I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.

I don't envy my teachers. I used to preach to them.

School doesn't teach you much. School teaches you how to follow directions, that's what school is for.

The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation.

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.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

All education must be self-education.

Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?" "Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the students learns?" "What's the difference?" "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?" -Jacen & Vergere

Some kids want to know why the teachers get paid when it's the kids who have to do all the work.

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.