Student-Centered Learning Quotes

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.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

An educator never says what he himself thinks, but only that which he thinks it is good for those whom he is educating to hear.

A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing... The teacher presents himself to his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he justifies his own existence.

It's the student who makes the teacher, not the other way around.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.

I don't think we will put higher-ed out of business. I think we'll evolve it. More access, higher quality, lower costs, more global reach.

Good teaching is forever being on the cutting edge of a child's competence.

Marist is a special place.

For digital natives, public schools are jails

You [the teacher] do not merely insert a lot of facts, if you teach them [the students] properly. It is not like injecting 500 cc. of serum, or administering a year's dose of vitamins.

Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is, into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.

I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers...creativity above fact regurgitation...individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance..... And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).

I was lucky to have a guitar teacher who asked me what I wanted to learn. I brought in "High & Dry" by Radiohead and "Mr. Jones" by Counting Crows and he was like, "Alright, I'm gonna teach you these, but you're also gonna learn some stuff that I want you to learn." He taught me Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, so I was getting the technical stuff and the fun stuff.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.

You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.

Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than for all flogging pedagogues to learn to educate with the head instead of with the hand.

Change the way we teach; Empower teachers

I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.

I would argue that the charter schools are really good at building programming and curriculum around the issues and the interests of the kids that they serve.

Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.