Confucius Quotes

The most valuable aid I have found in teaching is to remember my own experiences as a student.

He is not likely to learn who is not willing to be taught; for the learner has something to do, as well as the teacher.

As you lecture, you keep watching the faces, and information keeps coming back to you all the time.

Although there are some enormously gifted lecturers and preachers who do create community with oratory, I like to do anything I can to engage my students with each other, with me, and with the subject. And the subject, I think, always has to take prominence.

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles.

The only thing that happens when I'm teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions.

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.

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?

What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.

There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

That education is not an affair of "telling" and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory. Is not this deplorable situation due to the fact that the doctrine is itself merely told? It is preached; it is lectured; it is written about.

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.

At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teach—it is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.

I enjoyed teaching. I liked the students. Having to formulate my ideas about literature made them clearer. I did not particularly enjoy the more bureaucratic aspects of the job. However, if you are teaching fervently, your energy and time are used up at a great rate.

For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

We can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.

I am a teacher... The life I lead is the most agreeable I can imagine. [In the] classroom ... there await me a group of intelligent and curious young ... [people] who read the books assigned them with a sense of adventure and discovery, discuss them with zest, and listen appreciatively to explications I may offer. What makes the process most satisfying is the conviction that ... education is mankind's most important enterprise.

Good education has got to be good entertainment.

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.