Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

What do they teach them at these schools?

The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers.

Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has been in existence for most of this century.

New schools are being opened, and inspectors have been appointed to see that the instruction does not degenerate into vain and sterile examinations…there can be no doubt that French genius will produce works of distinction

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.

There is a great need for a new approach, new methods and new tools in teaching, man's oldest and most reactionary craft. There is great need for a rapid increase in the productivity of learning. There is, above all, great need for methods that will make the teacher effective and multiply his or her efforts and competence. Teaching is, in fact, the only traditional craft in which we have not yet fashioned the tools that make an ordinary person capable of superior performance. In this respect, teaching is far behind medicine, where the tools first became available a century or more ago.

School is an institution built on the axiom that learning is the result of teaching. And institutional wisdom continues to accept this axiom, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There is less flogging in our great schools than formerly-but then less is learned there; so what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.

We have always believed that our people can stand on no higher ground than the school ground, or can enter any more hopeful room than the classroom. We blend time and faith and knowledge in our schools - not only to create educated citizens, but also to shape the destiny of this great Republic.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. This means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you or pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?

The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.

To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.

The problem with education is school.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?" Well, it is not difficult. You tell them stories.

Teaching doesn't relate to photographing, at least not for me.

I teach how to fit into a world I don't want to live in. I just can't do it anymore.

I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!

There is no better way to learn than to teach.

We saw one school-house in our walk, and listened to the sounds which issued from it; but it appeared like a place where the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind was going on, and the pupils received only so much light as could penetrate the shadow of the Catholic church.

I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree that they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm off guesses as demonstrated truths.

Teaching ... particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they're all in the room. They know, like, nothing.

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process, where one rehearses constantly while acting, sits as a spectator at a play one directs, engages every part in order to keep the choices open and the shape alive for the student, so that the student may enter in, and begin to do what the teacher has done: make choices.