Quotable teacher, installment 21

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Quotable teacher, installment 20

"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple."
             — Amos Bronson Alcott

Quotable Teacher, installment 19

"“Probably the most violent and aggressive act that any person can do to other persons is to invade their minds with ideas and twists of meaning which disturb the comforting security of things known and faith kept. Yet this is what I, as a teacher, am required to do.” 
— R.W. Packer, Teaching in the Universities: No One Way

The Quotable Teacher, installment 18

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. (Robert Frost)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 17

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
(G.K. Chesterton)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 16

"No attitude, interest, or value can be taught except by a teacher who himself or herself believes in, cares for, or cherishes whatever it is that he or she holds out for emulation."

      — Philip Jackson,"The mimetic and the transformative: Alternatve outlooks on teaching"

The Quotable Teacher, installment 15

"It is natural to feel victimized by philosophy, but this particular defensive reaction goes too far. It is like the hatred of childhood and results in a vain effort to grow up too early, before one has gone through the essential formative confusions and exaggerated hopes that have to be experienced on the way to understanding anything. Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up. There is a persistent temptation to turn philosophy into something less difficult and more shallow than it is. It is an extremely difficult subject, and no exception to the general rule that creative efforts are rarely successful."

       — Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere

The Quotable Teacher, installment 14

Every act of teaching is also an act of teaching epistemology. For in trying to foster knowledge, the teacher inevitably teaches about knowledge: its nature, its value, and the pathways to its acquisition.

-- Me (OK, so I cheated. Blogger's privilege!)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 13

Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. ‘Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum’ [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]

 -- Michel de Montaigne

The Quotable Teacher, installment 12

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go.

— Mark Edmundson

The Quotable Teacher, installment 11

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre. — Gail Goldwin

The Quotable Teacher, installment 10

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists." 

-William James

The Quotable Teacher, installment 9

Few teachers effectively prepare students to learn on their own. Students are seldom given choices regarding academic tasks to pursue, methods for carrying out complex assignments or study partners. Few teachers encourage students to establish specific goals for their academic work or teach explicit study strategies. Also, students are rarely asked to self-evaluate their work or estimate their competence on new tasks.

— Barry Zimmerman, "Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview." Theory Into Practice, 41 (2), 64-70

The Quotable Teacher, installment 8

'Education' is not a concept that marks out any particular type of process such as training, or activity such as lecturing; rather it suggests criteria to which processes such as training must conform. One of these is that something of value must be passed on. Thus we may be educating someone while we are training him; but we need not be. For we may be training him in the art of torture. The demand, however, that there should be something of value in what is being transmitted cannot be construed as meaning that education itself should lead on to or produce something of value. This is like saying that ... reform must lead up to a man being better. The point is that making a man better is not extrinsic to reform; it is a criterion which anything must satisfy which is to be called 'reform'. People thus think that education must be for the sake of something extrinsic that is worthwhile, where as the truth is that being worthwhile is part of what is mean by calling it 'education'. 

R.S. Peters, "Education as initiation" (1965)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 7

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."  (Thomas Carruthers)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 6

Returning to a recent theme here at ISW:

At the center of understanding students is learning how to be intellectually and morally attentive as a teacher. ... I found that the language of calling, or vocation, helped capture the underlying motivations and conceptions of teaching better than the contemporary languages of profession, occupation, or job. The language of calling illuminates the sustained and deep regard the teachers have for their students, a quality perhaps shared by dedicated practitioners everywhere. (David T. Hansen, "Understanding students")

The Quotable Teacher, installment 5

"I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values. I am not thinking so much of the dangers with which technical progress has directly confronted mankind, as of the stifling of mutual human considerations by a 'matter-of-fact' habit of thought which has come to lie like a killing frost upon human relations. Without 'ethical culture' there is no salvation for humanity."

— Albert Einstein

The Quotable Teacher, installment 4

Apropos of Karla's remarks about students asking us questions:

"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 Wellington Rollins)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 3

To teach is to learn twice.  (Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842)

The Quotable Teacher, installment 2

This one's from Peter Markie, A Professor's Duties (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), p. 147:

It is frequently said that ethics cannot be taught. Upon examination this assertion usually means that moral values cannot be forced down a student's throat, that no coercive tactics seem to work. The assertion usually masks an explicit effort to "teach" some specific moral value to a student — an effort that invariably fails. I generally take encouragement from such accounts because they tend to confirm that students are not mindless and demand to be taken seriously.