Bill Ayers Quotes

What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.

The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught.

In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.

The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn.

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.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

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

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.

I have always felt that the true text-book for the pupil is his teacher

When you're researching you're learning. When you're writing, you're teaching.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.

All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.

Teaching may be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless somebody buys.

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.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

They call it coaching but it is teaching. You do not just tell them...you show them the reasons.

Those who can't do, teach!

A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant.

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Great men in teaching weak men to reflect have set them on the road to error.

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.