Leo Tolstoy Quotes

We put [young children] into kindergarten where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping.

I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.

An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.

I quickly learned that teaching students was far more complicated than managing adults. Why, you may ask? Here are three simple reasons: Your employees are paid to listen to you, students are not. In business, employees are selected based upon a search and interview process. Teachers do not select their students. In business, an insubordinate employee is fired. An insubordinate student is merely one more challenge for a classroom teacher.

It's hard to get an education when teachers spend 70 percent of their time trying to discipline students.

I really love teaching; I was actually studying to be a preschool teacher.

I'm a high school teacher. I'm someone who stumbles my way through, leads with my chin in some cases, leads with my heart in all cases.

The teacher, when she begins work in our schools, must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work.

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.

Education and the process of educating is a total integral, contextual situation which includes students, teachers, parents, administration and environment.

Most of my teachers probably found I made less trouble if they let me read.

So what does a good teacher do? Create tension - but just the right amount.

I had a public school education - 3,000 kids when I was there. And there were a lot of teachers who would just sit there. You'd come in and sign your name and the teacher would just sit there at the head of the class and you would literally just have to stay in your seat for 40 minutes and that was the only thing you'd have to do in class.

What makes me angry? The education of children. How in God's name can you expect to have a functioning society the way we teach our kids?

I think the best teachers had a real interest in the subject they were teaching and a love for children.

When I look back now I realize I was such an obnoxious kid but, you know, I went to schools like you, like a public school in New York so compared to the anarchy that was going on there, they really wouldn't - I wasn't like a bad kid. I saw people come in and punch the teachers.

Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

Teachers alone can't educate young people.

Teachers across the world are doing all they can to ensure a good education is the top priority for children.

We've never tried to educate children. We've never tried to preach to them, just entertain.

Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.

It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for 'basic skills' practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.

The best school in the world will scarcely save a boy who hates the school and the purpose it serves and the society that created it.

Are traditional schools very much like mini-prisons? Do they stifle imagination, cramp the child physically and mentally, and run on various forms of overt or covert terrorism? Of course, the answer is an unambiguous YES.