Teaching Philosophy Quotes

As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint not through words."

I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that.

I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it... I understand the philosophical background behind it, but I don't know a lot about it, and I don't think others know a lot about it.

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

I never lose sight of the fact that before I was a writer, I was a teacher. I still am. My classroom's just gotten a little bigger.

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.

A true teacher doesn't teach you to think like him, but to think without him.

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students.

For me, teaching is about weaving a web of connectedness between myself, my students, the subject I'm teaching, and the larger world.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

We teach what we know, but we reproduce what we are.

Repetition is the mother of pedagogy

I'm a teacher and a philosopher by nature... In the end, I'm trying to teach people to live a better life. And if I can do that on top of entertain, then I leave the world a better place.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

A true teacher does not terrorize ignorant students, because a true teacher knows that it is his job to cure ignorance.

I don't go to New York. I don't go to parties. I just do my business and study nature. My career is 28 years in an obscure art school, with limited staff and no perks. All I am is a teacher.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well—something in math—but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle.

What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.

I love teaching. I love working with kids... maybe some day I'll go back to the classroom. I'm not ready to say it'll never happen.

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.

That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

As we strive to teach others we must have the humility to acknowledge that we too still have much to learn.

In all teaching there must be a fusion of authority as an adult providing a stable framework for the children in one's care, and humility as another human being ready to educate an equal who may turn out to be a superior.

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.