Quotes

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

My job [is] to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining you get to ask this question: “Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

One of the most anxiety-​inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all.

The greatest gift that we can give our children is to believe in the following: That the gifted child is average with gifts, not superior with faults.

Definition of a lecture: a means of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.

Our job is to teach the students we have. Not the ones we would like to have. Not the ones we used to have. Those we have right now. All of them.

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

It’s more exciting knowing that what I found isn’t the final answer. I know a lot more than anyone here ever asks me.

We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or build with them.

Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.

School should not just be preparation for real life; rather, school can be real life.

If we had a world where everybody’s lens was shaped by openness and recognition of how much capacity we each have as human beings rather than a fear of one another and stereotypes of one another and expectations that we can only be this big, the world could be a totally different place.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

In education, parody is obsolete.

The smartest person in the room isn’t the person at the front of the room. It’s the room.

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.