Eric Maskin Quotes

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

The countries who do the best in international comparisons, whether it's Finland or Japan, Denmark or Singapore, do well because they have professional teachers who are respected, and they also have family and community which support learning.

I've got one grandson gone to MIT. Another grandson had been in the American school here. Because he was dyslexic, and we then didn't have the teachers to teach him how to overcome or cope with his dyslexia, so he was given exemption to go to the American school. He speaks like an American. He's going to Wharton.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

My high school was a private school where you went to an Ivy League. That's just what was expected of you and nothing less. So I grew up never being okay with a 'B' because a 'B' was not good enough.

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students. There has been no failure on our part in this regard considering how far they have gone.

Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

This great Western institution, the university, dominates the world today more than any other institution: more than the church, more than the government, more than all other institutions. All the leaders of government are graduates of universities, or at least of secondary schools or colleges whose administrators and teachers are themselves graduates of universities….professionals—doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. have all passed through the mill of the secondary school, the college and the university. And the men of the media are university trained

Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.

I had considered MIT a place where brilliant people came.

A rational system and order for educational administration should be established on the principle of ensuring smooth progress of teaching and scientific research by teachers and researchers, and of edification of students.

Call me old-fashioned, but it's always been my firm belief that a teacher's job should be for each of his or her students to finish the year with a grade of 100%.

I had the benefit of going to a really good high school on Long Island. I went to Shoreham-Wading River High School, which kind of started as an experimental public school back in the 60s and 70s. It had a bunch of teachers there with a unique teaching philosophy.

Coming from a family who put a lot of emphasis on academics, I always thought I was going to be a lawyer.

Many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won't get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.

C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.

Marylanders are among the nation's hardest working and most educated people. We have universities and schools that are among the best in the nation.

The better the teacher, the better the future of America.

I went to a really smart school where all the kids go to the Ivy Leagues.

I went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart for four years. It was interesting to me because, in a family where men were clearly favored over women, this was an atmosphere, a world, run by strong, determined, smart women in leadership, who had high expectations of the girls, and this tremendous sense of love and commitment to the wider world.

Both my parents are teachers, and while they were always cool with what I did, they never let me take my education lightly.

All of my contemporaries in L.A. are all graduates of either Yale, Julliard, Trinity. The best of the bunch come from that.

At Horace Mann High School in affluent Riverdale, New York, one of the top schools in the country, those who receive double time on tests are plentiful enough to qualify as their own segment of the student body. Known to their peers as 2Ts, they participate in the same activities, get the same grades, and attend the same range of colleges.

The nature of education fundamentally has not changed in a century - and I say this as someone whose parents are both teachers.