Plato Quotes

If you want young people to take right and wrong seriously, you must put them in the presence of people who take right and wrong seriously.

Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.

Every good teaching may still end up producing evil bandits who have no principles whatsoever, an outcome even more likely when the teacher is also a bandit.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult ethical controversies of the day.

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

Likewise, education can direct people toward good or evil ends. When education is based on a fundamentally distorted worldview, the results are horrific.

Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

For children to take morality seriously they must be in the presence of adults who take morality seriously. And with their own eyes they must see adults take morality seriously.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

Although children are good and well born, vice will blight them if they are not well educated.

Everything we do as teachers has moral overtones.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

Whilst that the childe is young, let him be instructed in vertue and lytterature.

Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.

The good man is the teacher of the bad, And the bad is the material from which the good may learn. He who does not value the teacher, Or greatly care for the material, Is greatly deluded although he may be learned. Such is the essential mystery.

Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but it the mirror will not wash your face.

It is the business of the teacher ... to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign.

If you're a teacher you have to teach the curriculum, all that stuff, you have to teach morals, you have to teach values, and you have to teach, all-importantly, self-control. Because a lot of kids don't have it.

There’s more time spent on teaching kids about recycling than on character development in the American schools.

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

It depends on education--that holder of the keys which the Almighty hath put into our hands--to open the gates which lead to virtue or to vice, to happiness or misery.