Bruce Babbitt Quotes

Parents deserve the peace of mind of knowing their children are in good hands. By investing in early childhood educators, we are supporting nurturing child care environments where children can thrive.

I've always had a strong love and a sense of care for kids. And the one thing is evident and is so true - the kids are our future.

I believe that the first 8 years are most important and the time in a child's life when parents must be absolutely and completely present.

We cannot educate children who are not healthy, and we cannot have healthy children without education.

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

This is our first task-caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be judged.

In Burma, we need to improve education in the country - not only primary education, but secondary and tertiary education. Our education system is very very bad. But, of course, if you look at primary education, we have to think in terms of early childhood development that's going back to before the child is born - making sure the mother is well nourished and the child is properly nurtured.

Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.

The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.

One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.

If we buy a plant of a horticulturist we ask him many questions as to its needs, whether it thrives best in sunshine or in shade, whether it needs much or little water, what degrees of heat or cold; but when we hold in our arms for the first time a being of infinite possibilities, in whose wisdom may rest the destiny of a nation, we take it for granted that the laws governing its life, health, and happiness are intuitively understood, that there is nothing new to be learned in regard to it.

The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil.

A child in his earliest years, when he is only two or a little more, is capable of tremendous achievements simply through his unconscious power of absorption, though he is himself still immobile. After the age of three he is able to acquire a great number of concepts through his own efforts in exploring his surroundings. In this period he lays hold of things through his own activity and assimilates them into his mind.

Now, the education of our children is of national concern, and if they are not educated properly, it is a national calamity.

From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance.

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

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.

Freedom without organization of work would be useless. The child left free without means of work would go to waste, just as a new-born baby, if left free without nourishment, would die of starvation.The organization of the work, therefore, is the cornerstone of this new structure of goodness [in education], but even that organization would be in vain without the liberty to make use of it.

Go practice if you please with men and women: leave a child alone for Christ's particular love's sake!

School is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.

If a mother respects both herself and her child from his very first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others.