Sunday, March 21, 2010
Vision for the perfect world...
This week I would love to hear from some friends. Please post your ideas about the perfect education. What is your vision? What is the purpose for sending your child to school each day? What do we want our children to gain from going to school? What kinds of people do we hope to produce from this experience? What do we wish could have been different for us in our own education?
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Here are some interesting quotes to ponder about education:
ReplyDelete"The whole object of education is...to develop the mind. The mind should be a thing that works."
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) American novelist and short story writer.
"Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave."
John Ruskin (1819-1900) English critic
"Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician and writer.
"You can lade a man up to th' university, but ye can't make him think."
Finley Peter Dunne (1867—1936) U.S. author, writer and humorist.
"It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry…. I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not…"
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) U.S. physicist
"I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) British dramatist, critic, writer.
"The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher."
Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author, editor and printer.
I took these quotes from a web site maintained by Donald Simanek http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/home.htm (I think he is a science teacher). He has also found it challenging to find many positive statements about the possibilities of education. Some of my favorites are:
"Education: Being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it."
William A. Feather (1889-1981) American publisher and author.
"Education is not the filling a bucket but the lighting of a fire."
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet, dramatist.
"To be able to be caught up into the world of thought—that is educated."
Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American educator and author.
"Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world."
Maria Montessori (1870–1952) Italian physician, educator, philosopher, humanitarian.
"There is a great danger in the present day lest science- teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding."
J. D. Everett [In the preface to his 1873 English translation of Elementary Treatise on Natural Philosophy by A Privat Deschanel. (D. Appleton and Co.)]
Anyway, add your own favorites or thoughts.