Sylvia Earle Quotes

By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man.

I think that our work contributed to the safety of the world.

Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.

The home is the child's first school, the parent is the child's first teacher, and reading is the child's first subject.

Humanity as a species must change dramatically and radically or our survival is at stake.

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die.

Teaching children how to be eco-friendly at preschool age is just so obvious and so fantastic. It creates habits that they get into for a lifetime and then they put pressure on their parents.

Home is a child's first and most important classroom.

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? .. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

Perhaps, one of our greatest challenges as a nation, as a people, as human beings making sure that our grandkids can live on this Earth.

One of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.

The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

You're going to have to change the priorities of your life, if you love this planet.

We're never going to have respectful and reverential relationships with the planet- and sensible policies about what we put in the air, the soil, the water - if very young children don't begin learning about these things literally in their houses, backyards, streets and schools. We need to have human beings who are oriented that way from their earliest memories.

Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.

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.

Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country.

Personally, I think it's a good way to let a child start right in with the laws of Nature before he's old enough to be surprised at them.

I've always loved children. When I was working with children as a librarian, I loved being with them and working around them.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction.

How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.

It is ironical that in an age when we have prided ourselves on our progress in the intelligent care and teaching of children we have at the same time put them at the mercy of new and most terrible weapons of destruction.

In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline.