A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ
Marian Galbraith teacher
Imagine if we loved other people’s children enough to do what we would do for our own – to fight for them, to protect them, to work to give them the best of everything. That level of compassion takes courage – political courage, financial courage, and emotional courage. It takes courage to act on what we know is best for our children – to dig in our heels and say no to bad decisions, to risk condemnation or even our jobs to support what we know is right for children. The real heroes in education are the people willing to take a stand for what is right.
Gabriela Gallardo Special Education Teacher, California
I am a special education teacher, and I had the pleasure of having an autistic child in my classroom this year. Patrick was a fifth grader and this June, when he was promoted to sixth grade, he surprised me with a gift that he was eager for me to open. After I opened the present and saw that it was a beautiful table clock, Patrick quickly asked if I knew why he had gotten me a clock. I replied that I didn’t and to that he most lovingly answered: “Because every time you look at the clock you’ll know I love you all the time.”
Galileo Galilei
We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
The Universe is a grand book which cannot be read until one first learns to comprehend the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.
Gallagher
I wish here was a knob on the TV so you could turn up the intelligence. They have one marked brightness, but it doesn’t work.
Indira Gandhi
My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery, and tenacity.
Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
The law of love could be best understood and learned through little children.
If we are to attain real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a war against war, we will have to begin with the children.
Real education consists in drawing the best out of yourself.
I have always felt that the true text book for the pupil is his teacher.
Lella Gandini (American early childhood educator and writer)
All children have preparedness, potential, curiosity and interest in constructing their learning, in engaging in social interaction and in negotiating with everything the environment brings to them.
John W. Gardner
Education in the formal sense is only a part of the society’s larger task of abetting the individual’s intellectual, emotional and moral growth. What we must reach for is a conception of perpetual self-discovery, perpetual reshaping to realize one’s best self, to be the person one could be.
Organizations go to seed when the people in them go to seed. And they awaken when the people awaken. The renewal of organizations and societies starts with people.
Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
Jerry Garicia of the Grateful Dead
Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.
David P. Gardiner (President University of Utah)
Much that passes for education . . . is not education at all but ritual. The fact is that we are being educated when we know it least.
James A. Garfield (American president)
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
Stanley Garn
If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
José Ortega Gasset (Spanish philosopher and statesman 1883 – 1955)
He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find . . . the new truth.
Bill Gates
We at Microsoft strongly believe that the single most important use of information technology is to improve education.
Training the work force of tomorrow with today’s high schools, is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.
John Taylor Gatto
I’ve taught public school for 26 years but I just can’t do it anymore. For years I asked the local school board and superintendent to let me teach a curriculum that doesn’t hurt kids, but they had other fish to fry. So I’m going to quit, I think.
I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach how to fit into a world I don’t want to live in.
I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first — the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel “learning disabled” and slow David down a bit, too.
For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, “special education.” After a few months she’ll be locked into her place forever.
In 26 years of teaching rich kids and poor, I almost never met a “learning disabled” child; hardly ever met a “gifted and talented” one, either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by the human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
The Nine Assumptions of Modern Schooling
- Government school is the essential force for social cohesion. It cannot happen any other way. A bureaucratized public order is our defense against chaos and anarchy.
- The socialization of children in groups monitored by state agents is essential; without this, children cannot learn to get along with others in a pluralistic society.
- Children from different backgrounds and from families with different beliefs must be mixed together. Robert Frost was wrong when he maintained “good fences make good neighbors.”
- The certifiable expertise of official schoolteachers is superior to that of lay people including parents. The protection of children from the uncertified is a compelling public concern.
- Coercion in the name of liberty is a valid use of state power. Compelling children to assemble in mandated groups for mandated intervals with mandated texts and overseers does not interfere with academic learning.
- Children will inevitably grow apart from their parents in beliefs as they grow older and this process must be supported and encouraged. The best way to do this is by diluting parental influence and discouraging the children’s attitudes that their own parents are sovereign in either mind or morality.
- The world is full of crazy parents who will ruin their children. An overriding concern of schooling is to protect children from bad parenting.
- It is not appropriate for any family to unduly concern itself with the education of its own children, but it may expend unlimited effort on behalf of the general education of everyone.
- The State has the predominant responsibility for training, morals, and beliefs. Children schooled outside government scrutiny frequently become anti-social and poverty stricken.
From: Education and the Western Spiritual Tradition
The net effect of holding a child in confinement for 12 years and longer without any honor paid to the spirit is an extended demonstration that the State considers the Western God tradition to be dangerous. And, of course, it is. Schooling is about creating loyalty to an abstract central authority, and no serious rival can be welcome in a school that includes mother and father, tradition, local custom, self-management, or God. http://csf.colorado.edu/sine/transcripts/gatto.html (link to full speech)
The Supreme Court Everson ruling of 1947 established the principle that the State would have no truck with spirits. There was no mention that 150 years of American judicial history had passed without any other court finding this fantastic hidden meaning in the Constitution.
But even if we forego an examination of the motives of this court and grant that the ruling is a sincere expression of the rational principle behind modern leadership, we would be justified in challenging Everson today because of the grotesque record laid down over the past 50 years of spiritless schooling. Dis-spirited schooling has been tested and found fully wanting. I personally think that that’s because it is a liar’s game that denies the metaphysical reality recognized by men and women worldwide today and in every age.
Science cannot help with time. In fact, living scientifically so as not to waste time, becoming one of those poor souls who never goes anywhere without a list, is the best guarantee that your life will be eaten up by errands and that none of those errands will ever become the big deal that you desperately need to finally love yourself because the list of things still to do will go ever onward and onward. The best lives are full of contemplation, full of solitude, full of self-examination, full of private, personal attempts to engage the metaphysical mystery of existence.
There must be a reason that we are called human beings and not human doings. And I think the reason is to commemorate the way we can make the best of our limited time by alternating effort with reflection and reflection completely free of the get-something motive. Whenever I see a kid daydreaming in school, I’m careful never to shock the reverie out of existence.
Bill Geiss
The sound of children at play is the closest thing to God’s own voice we shall ever hear.
A Bartlett Giamatti (Former President Yale)
Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.
Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) English historian
The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The love of study, a passion which derives great vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day . . . with a perpetual round of independent and rational pleasure.
Kahlil Gibran
The teacher who . . . is indeed wise does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
Oh don’t the days seem lank and long
When all goes right and nothing goes wrong,
And isn’t your life extremely flat
With nothing whatever to grumble at!
If you wish in this world to advance
Your merits you’re bound to enhance,
You must stir and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or, trust me, you haven’t a chance!
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it.
Haim Ginott (Israeli psychologist 1922 – 1975)
The world talks to the mind. A teacher speaks more intimately; he talks to the heart.
A teacher, like a playwright, has an obligation to be interesting or, at least, brief. A play closes with it ceases to interest audiences.
Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather… I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether the crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or de-humanized. Teacher and Child
Allen Ginsberg
Whoever controls the media – the images – controls the culture.
Natalia Ginzburg
Children should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.
Henry A. Giroux
Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience. . . was disparaged.
Bhagavad Gita
As we believe, so we are. All actions that we take in life, except for instinctive acts, are based on certain conscious and unconscious beliefs and presuppositions. Consequently, it is important that we understand the relationship between our actions and our beliefs.
William Glasser
Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.
Gail Godwin (American writer b. 1937)
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German writer 1749 – 1832)
A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good poem accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.
Everywhere, we learn only from those whom we love.
We don’t get to know anything but what we love.
In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.
For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.
Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
He who seizes the right moment, is the right man.
Genius is formed in quiet, character in the stream of life.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
He who is plenteously provided for from within, needs little from without.
A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.
They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless.
Correction does much, but encouragement does more. Encouragement after censure is as the sun after a shower.
On every mountain height is Rest.
A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better than book or orator.
If any wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.
Live dangerously and you live right.
The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.
Justice Arthur Goldberg
If Columbus had an advisory committee, he would probably still be at the dock.
Emma Goldman
“Predigested food” should be inscribed over every hall of learning as a warning to all who do not wish to lose their own personalities and their original sense of judgment.
Jane Goodall Respect for Life, in Clifton Fadiman, ed., Living Philosophies (1990)
Our children are brutalized and insensitized if they are made to pull the spinal cord from a living frog : it will be that much easier, subsequently, to harm a dog, a chimpanzee – a human. Thus a more humane ethic – a respect for all living things -is desirable not only for the well-being of non-human animals, but for our own spiritual development as well.
Paul Goodman
A good teacher feels his way, looking for response.
Emma Goldman
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
Goldsmith The Deserted Village
There, in his noisy mansion, skill’d to rule,
The village master taught his little school; . . .
Full well they laugh’d , with counterfeited glee,
At all his joke, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper circling round,
Convey’d the dismal tidings when he frown’d.
Raisa Gorbachev
Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark that you always carry in your heart.
Thomas Gordon Parent Effectiveness Training
“Why are children the last ones to be protected against the potential evils of power and authority? Is it that they are smaller, or that adults find it so much easier to rationalize the use of power with such notions as ‘Father knows best’ or ‘It’s for their own good’?
Fred G. Gosman
Ignoring a child’s disrespect is the surest guarantee that it will continue.
Elinor Goulding Smith
It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born. This is not necessarily cause for alarm. The important thing is to keep your wits about you and borrow some money.
Here is this baby and he refuses to eat his solid food. (“Solid” in this case is a euphemism for “squishy.”) Are you a failure as a parent? Is he a failure as a baby? Is the pediatrician a failure as a pediatrician? Would the baby rather have a hot pastrami sandwich? This brings us to the primary rule of baby raising, which is the solution to this and all subsequent problems. This rule must be followed faithfully, and practiced regularly, and you should make it a habit to repeat it to yourself ten times a day. It is the – Golden Rule – of raising babies. LIE. Lie to your mother, lie to your sisters and aunts, and above all, lie to all the other mothers you meet on the street. When a newer mother than you asks for your help. tell her you never had the least trouble. Your baby just loved his mashed bananas on the first try.
The Complete Book of Absolutely Perfect Baby and Child Care (1957)
Rémy de Gourmont
We live less and less, and we learn more and more. Sensibility is surrendering to intelligence.
Harry L. Gracey (Sociologist)
While children’s perceptions of the world and opportunities for genuine spontaneity and creativity are being systematically eliminated from the kindergarten, unquestioned obedience to authority and rote learning of meaningless material are being encouraged
Steffi Graf
As long as I can focus on enjoying what I’m doing, having fun, I know I’ll play well.
Martha Graham
No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time, it is just that others are behind the times.
Antonio Gramsci
In education one is dealing with children in whom one has to inculcate certain habits of diligence, precision, poise (even physical poise), ability to concentrate upon specific subjects, which cannot be acquired without the mechanical repetition of disciplined and methodical acts.
Maude Grant The Instructor 1926
September days are glad days,
For school has now begun,
We’ll have to work
And study hard,
But also we’ll have fun.
John Gray Children Are From Heaven
It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.
Hubert Green
Winning breeds confidence, and confidence breeds winning.
Stephen Greenleaf
If ignorance where a muffler, the world would be as silent as a tomb.
Vartan Gregorian Iranian-born American teacher
But you always remember the teacher who said, “Bill, you’re a unique moment in history. You are a unique being. What are you going to do to deserve that uniqueness?”
Robin Grill Cultivating your Child’s Emotional Intelligence
By re-activating our childhood feelings and memories, children help us to highlight that which wants healing inside each of us; and thus they furnish us with countless opportunities for personal growth. Our children make us better parents, but also better people, and in that regard they give us as much as we give them. Without knowing it, they help to shape our emotional intelligence as we contribute to theirs.
Angelina Grimke
We are commanded to love God with all our minds, as well as with all our hearts, and we commit a great sin if we forbid or prevent that cultivation of the mind in others which would enable them to perform this duty.
Judith Groch
It is always easier . . . to manipulate the child to fit the theory than to adjust the theory to suit the child – provided, of course, one is very careful not to look at the child.
Perhaps the best thing we can do for the creative person is to stay out of his way.
Those who have been required to memorize the world as it is will never create the world as it might be.
The educational system is regarded simultaneously as the nation’s scapegoat and savior.
In our mechanized society where thoughts as well as automobiles may be assembled in an automated factory, it is also, by some narrow logic, expedient to reduce children to those yes-no codes most easily processed by such a system . . . . When life become one giant data-processing system, the winners are those with the greatest aptitude for being data.
Matt Groening (Writer of The Simpsons)
Families are about love and overcoming emotional torture.
Richard L. Grossman and Frank T. Adams
Today’s business corporation is an artificial creation, shielding owners and managers while preserving corporate privilege and existence. Artificial or not, corporations have won more rights under law than people have – rights which government has protected with armed force.
Gerald O. Grow
The task of the best teacher is to balance the difficult juggling act of becoming vitally, vigorously, creatively, energetically, and inspiringly unnecessary.
Arthur Gutterman
Who learns by finding out, has seven fold the skill of him who learned by being told.