by Curt Kovener
Students are heading back to school so it is an appropriate time to turn the podium over to Prof. Ron Atkins for some of his collected quotes on the subject of education for our youth, our parents, our legislative leaders…and the rest of us, too
•At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living
~Neil Postman
•Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.
~Bob Talbert
•Only the educated are free.
~Epictetus
•Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
~G. K. Chesterton
•An educated man is one who can entertain a new idea, entertain another person, and entertain himself.
~Sydney Wood
•The responsibility for producing an educated citizenry is too important to be left entirely to educators. Education is everybody’s business.
~Thomas J. Brown
•The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.
~Alice W. Rollins
•You can pay people to teach, but not to care.
~Marva Collins
•Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
~Jacques Barzun
•They say what you don’t know won’t hurt you—and some of us haven’t felt a twinge of pain in years.
~Fletcher Knebel
•There is nothing more powerful than ignorance, not even intelligence.
~Lillian Smith
•Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
~Samuel Johnson
•The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
~James Russell Lowell
•Man’s most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.
~Margaret Mead
•Educators should be chosen not merely for their special qualifications, but more for their personality and their character, because we teach more by what we are than by what we teach.
~Will Durant
•Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
~Carl Jung
•Good teachers cost a lot, but poor teachers cost a lot more.
•Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.
Gail Godwin
•Everything works when the teacher works. It’s as easy as that, and as hard.
~Marva Collins
•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.
~John W. Gardner
•No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
~Lady Montagu
•Children have a lot more worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
~E.L. Doctorow
•Please remember these two difficult truths of teaching: 1. No matter how much you do, you’ll feel it’s not enough; 2. Just because you can only do a little is no excuse to do nothing.
~Susan Ohanian
•America’s future will be determined by the home and the school. The child becomes largely what it is taught, hence we must watch what we teach it, how we live before it.
~Jane Addams
•One of the chief hindrances to decent education in America today is the overloading of our schools by placing on their shoulders responsibilities which in other times and other countries have, as a matter of course, been assumed by the home.
~Bernard Bell
•Most schools have more assistant coaches than assistant principals.
~David Byre