Marva Collins Quotes
When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.
Collins, Marva, and Civia Tamarkin. Marva Collins' Way. J.P. Tarcher, 1982.
Actually, this is a classic case of what the scientists call “co-morbidity”. There are a number of factors that determine whether or not children will do well in school, and each of them are factors. Certainly the teacher is one critical factor, that resonates with most of us as we can remember the inspirational and better teachers that we ourselves experienced. However, there are many people who receive good educations without particularly inspirational teachers. Some who have sufficient motivation are even self taught. Parental influence is a major factor but there have been many exceptional educations obtained by children who were orphans or who came from dysfunctional families with uneducated, ignorant parents who saw little or no value in education. Any improvements we can make in any of these factors will produce better educational outcomes.
He was a rabid anti-teacher fanatic. Teachers on most schools sustems are entitled to due process, a reaction aginst the past times when teachers were fired for not supporting the political party in power or other things having nothing to do with education. This due process is interpreted by some to mean that teachers cannot be fired. This is an exaggeration. There is no school district in the United States where a teacher cannot be fired for directly harming children. However, under most school system rules, teachers cannot be fired because their students do not learn the curriculum. This does “screw up chldren’s lives”. Whether or not a student learns involves too many factors other than the teacher to hold teachers responsible. In most school ditricts, the teachers do not choose the curriculum, and are given the textbooks and instructional materials which they must use even if they think better ones are avaialbe. Some children have learning difficulties and others are not motivated at all. Some parents are not supportive of the school, and some children lead such stressful lives that learning is very difficult.
Marva Delores Collins was an American educator. Collins is best known for creating Westside Preparatory School, a private elementary school in the impoverished Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois which opened in 1975.
