“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied, “and the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
Lewis Carroll. (1865). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter X. London: Macmillan & Company.
“Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?”
John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American Education. He was a participant in the Harper’s Magazine forum “School on a Hill,” which appeared in the September 2003 issue.
Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy. (1963). Address to 90th Anniversary Convocation of Vanderbilt University.
There are two human inventions which may be considered more difficult than any others—the art of government, and the art of education; and people still contend as to their very meaning.
—Immanuel Kant. (1803). On Education. Koenigsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius.
Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children[’s] […] normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don’t understand.
—Noam Chomsky. (1992, November 5). Creation & Culture Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
We place our feet where they have never been.
We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy.
Who is down there but our old teachers?
Water that once could take no human weight—
We were students then—holds up our feet,
And goes on ahead of us for a mile.
Beneath us the teachers, and around us the stillness. — Robert Bly. (1999). “Gratitude to Old Teachers” in Eating the Honey of Words. New York: HarperCollins.