Nel Noddings Quotes

When a child is thriving, there is no reason to spend time assessing intelligences. But when a child is NOT thriving - in school or at home - that is the time to apply the lens of multiple intelligences and see whether one can find ways to help the child thrive in different environments.

School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn't worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave.

When schools truly become centers of the community, where you have extraordinary teachers, the best teachers, the best principals, great nonprofit partners coming in during the non-school hours to support and do enrichment activities, social services, then those students will beat the odds, will beat poverty, will beat violence in the community, will beat sometimes dysfunctional families, and be productive citizens long term. They will go to college.

What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Learning is about much more than science and math. Doing theater, music, and art in school really helps children's minds grow because they're using different parts of their brains. Parents who care should insist on that.

Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it.

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

Sex education, including its spiritual aspects, should be part of a broad health and moral education from kindergarten through grade twelve, ideally carried out harmoniously by parents and teachers.

Public school teachers in Long Island, New York, saved my life in the '70s. They were involved and invested and helpful. One took me into her family and loved me back to life. She taught me that love is not formed and families are not formed by blood. That love makes a family.

I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why they're here. If they like their jobs. Or us. And I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It's like looking at all the students and wondering who's had their heart broken that day, and how they are able to cope with having three quizzes and a book report due on top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why.

And if you look at society, the way it works, they are creating, from cradle to grave, left-brain prisoners. To advance in this society, you have to be good at passing exams in school, which are taking in left-brain information overwhelmingly. Then you go to the next level, and so on so that by the time you reach any level of significant influence in society or the institutions of society, you are fundamentally locked into your left brain. Or at least the majority of people are.

This idea that people have to love and understand each other is absurd. It's not human nature.

That's how I try to think of education - a school is a miniature society where children learn to function in a real world.

I think every single one of us can think back on the key individuals in our lives who really made a difference, and also maybe some of those who sent us astray. There are those are the teachers who are brave enough to buck the system, and obviously not in such a way that jeopardizes their jobs, but brave enough to say, "I know I have to accomplish that, but I want to know how I'm going to help this child get there differently. I want to know what makes this child tick, and I want to help him get there from a place of curiosity, rather than from a place where I impose my ideas on him."

The greatest of all the arts is the art of living together!

A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.

We're all on a journey - each one of us. And if we can be sensitive to the person who happens to be our neighbor, that, to me, is the greatest challenge as well as the greatest pleasure.

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

So long as the mental and moral instruction of man is left solely in the hands of hired servants of the public--let them be teachers of religion, professors of colleges, authors of books, or editors of journals or periodical publications, dependent upon their literary incomes for their daily bread, so long shall we hear but half the truth; and well if we hear so much. Our teachers, political, scientific, moral, or religious; our writers, grave or gay, are compelled to administer to our prejudices and to perpetuate our ignorance.

Incivility is not a Vice of the Soul, but the effect of several Vices; of Vanity, Ignorance of Duty, Laziness, Stupidity, Distraction, Contempt of others, and Jealousy.

I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.

The school of relationships is where you learn self-knowledge. I just don't know how you could learn it sitting alone in the desert on a rock by yourself. You have to see where you fail at it. And that confrontation with your own ability - "I was again not able to love" - those are the teachable moments.

Relationships are our primary teacher. They are the context in which we either grow into God consciousness, or deny ourselves and others the opportunity to do so.

School performance, public health, crime rates, clinical depression, tax compliance, philanthropy, race relations, community development, census returns, teen suicide, economic productivity, campaign finance, even simple human happiness - all are demonstrably affected by how (and whether) we connect with our family and friends and neighbours and co-workers.