Margaret Mead Quotes

All over China, parents tell their children to stop complaining and to finish their quadratic equations and trigonometric functions because there are sixty-five million American kids going to bed with no math at all.

If you have a 2-year-old who is non-verbal, don't wait until you get a diagnosis at 4. The child needs one-on-one teaching with an effective teacher now. This can be a grandmother or a teacher or someone from the community. Grandmothers are especially great. There are a lot of grannies around. Go to your church for help.

The range of individuality in children is infinite, but every class of children seemed to have the same groups. And there was a chief girl and a chief boy - a girl that all the other girls of that age looked up to and imitated and a boy that all the boys looked up to and imitated. I realized that if I got them on my side and exclusively taught them for a couple of weeks, maybe for the first full term, then I wouldn't have any trouble. Teachers often make the mistake of thinking they're the boss of the class; they're not. The boss of the class is sitting down there somewhere.

There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build.

I think every single one of us can think back on the key individuals in our lives who really made a difference, and also maybe some of those who sent us astray. There are those are the teachers who are brave enough to buck the system, and obviously not in such a way that jeopardizes their jobs, but brave enough to say, "I know I have to accomplish that, but I want to know how I'm going to help this child get there differently. I want to know what makes this child tick, and I want to help him get there from a place of curiosity, rather than from a place where I impose my ideas on him."

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

Good teachers don't approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They're not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don't yet know what's in the box. They don't know if it's breakable.

It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience.

Children exist in the world as well as in the family. From the moment they are born, they depend on a host of other “grownups” — grandparents, neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold others who touch their lives directly and indirectly.

If you see a child with autistic-like behaviors at age two and three, the worst thing you can do is just let them sit and watch TV all day. That's just the worst thing you can do. You need to have a teacher working with that child, working on teaching language, working on social interaction, working on getting them interested in different things, and keeping their brain connected to the world.

Does sex education encourage sex? Many parents are afraid that talking about sex with their teenagers will be taken as permission for the teen to have sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the more children learn abour sexuality from talking with their parents and teachers and reading accurate books, the less they feel compelled to find out for themselves.

There is no profession more essential than that of an educator, and it's time for all of us to embrace and celebrate their importance and contribution to America's children.

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages.

The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.

The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material

We want our children to fit in and to stand out. We rarely address the conflict between these goals.

By learning to yield to the loving authority of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life — his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers.

The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.

Much of the pressure contemporary parents feel with respect to dressing children in designer clothes, teaching young children academics, and giving them instruction in sports derives directly from our need to use our children to impress others with our economic surplus. We find "good" rather than real reasons for letting our children go along with the crowd.

Some kids are fine, but often I don't like what I see in child actors. My kids are young and they are already showing an interest, so I have to try to discourage them, squash that in them.

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, are prohibited.

Children long to know that they are lovable. And there are ways that technology can help with that. But ultimately it's their relationships with their parents, their grandparents, their peers, and their teachers that help them to know that for sure. A child can learn the word "hug" and the letters h-u-g through a computer, but a computer can never give the child a hug.

No child is taught to kill, but he has to be taught to love, respect, honor and value, not only his own life, but the lives of his classmates, parents and teachers. He has to experience love and acceptance. He has to know his life has purpose and meaning. No amount of money can do that.

Teachers today can't take to a child.

All children have gifts, some open them at different times.