Educational Quotes for the 21stC
prepared by
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A number of people have indicted to Bruce that they enjoy the quotes he and Wayne has used in the past in the Leading and Learning Newsletter. The quotes represent the philosophy that we want to share.
Some people use them in their own school newsletters or BOT reports - or just like picking one out to place on in the staffroom notice board. Many would be useful to include in the schools vision or charter.
With these thought in mind the quotes have been organised into categories and will be added to as time goes by.
Feel free to send in quotes to share with others: bhammonds@leading-learning.co.nz
The quotes are listed under:
Philosophy
The school As a Learning Community
Vision and Values
The Change Process
Leadership and Teamwork
Strategic Planning
Teaching and Learning
Curriculum
Thinking
Achievement
Class Management
New headings will be developed as required
General Philosophy
'Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.' Fullan and Hargreaves
Lucy: 'Charlie Brown on the cruise ship of life which way is your deck chair facing?' Charlie Brown ponders and replies, 'I don't know, I've never been able to get one open'. Charles Schultz
'After you understand the about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.' Alfred North Whitehead
'Whatever you can dream, begin to do it. Boldness has the power and magic in it.' Goethe
'As a child lives today he will live tomorrow' John Dewy
If you plan is for one year, plant rice;
If you plan is for ten years, plant trees;
If your plan is for a hundred years,
Educate children.' Confucius
If you know where you want to go, you have a better chance of getting there' Anon
Destiny is not a matter of chance it is a matter of choice.' Anon
' There is a road to the heart and it doesn't go through the intellect.' G K Chesterton
'Nothing is ever achieved without enthusiasm.' Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chaos breeds life while order breeds habits' Henry Adams.
'Where all think alike no-one thinks much.' Walter Lipman
'It is easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission.' Jesuit saying
'It takes a whole village to raise a child.' African saying
'Schools should be a mirror of a future society.' Anon
'How do we recapture the magic and myth of education? ... to enable teachers to believe in their importance...so teachers and the public can rediscovers the hope schools once held?'
Deal and Peterson
'We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.' Roald Dahl
'Education is at a turning point' Howard Gardner
'All great truths begin as blasphemies.' George Bernard Shaw
'If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.' Ludwig Wittgenstein
Learning Community
'Community building must become the heart of any school improvement effort.
Thomas Sergiovanni
'To cope with a changing world, ant entity must develop the capacity of shifting and changing - of developing new skills and attitudes; in short, the capability of learning.'
A De Gues, The Living Company
'We spend too much of our time worrying about the mosquitoes and not enough time concerning ourselves about the health of the pond.' Anon
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Ten years ago Peter Sense introduced the idea of the 'Learning Organisation', Now he Says... to change we need to stop thinking like mechanics and to start acting like gardeners... Companies are actually living organisms not machines' Fast Company
'People come to relate to each other in predicable ways, which form a pattern that when defined the structure of relationships - norms, expectations, taken for granted habits of communicating. These patterns aren't fixed; they can change. Fast Company
' Communities of the mind are collections of individuals who are bonded together by natural will and to a set of shared ideals and ideals.' Thomas Sergiovanni
A learning organisation sees the environment. as messy, complex and volatile. It picks and chooses it's way attempting to use certain events as catalysts for action, turn constraints into opportunities, and blunt or minimise the impositions that do not make sense...because they know that that is the only way to survive and prosper in a complex environment. Michael Fullan
'Shared values are more important than paper and policies. We need, passion, people, and pride. Leadership not management.' Lester Levy
'Without question we have had a breakdown in the sense of community. The solution is to restore a sense of community...and doing within the school.' James Comer
Ko te pae tawhiti, whaia kia tata Ko te pae tata, whakamaua kia tina'
Seek those distant horizons and cherish those you attain
'It's not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest'. Charles Darwin
'To raise new questions, new problems, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and makes real advances'
Albert Einstein
' Education for the future has left the harbour and is already on the open seas. Some educators are still clinging to the belief that the ship hasn't left and are invested in business as usual. Some educators are enjoying the freedom of the open seas .... excited about the foreign ports and places they will visit '
Renata and Geoffrey Caine
'Changing public education is like punching a pillow or as someone once said like moving a cemetery; after you've done all the work you still have a cemetery.' Art Costa
'Our challenge. How do we create organisational coherence...how do we create structures that move with change, that are flexible and adaptive...that enable rather than constrain? How do we resolve the need for personal freedom and autonomy with organisational needs for prediction and control' Margaret Wheatley
'Biological systems are adaptable, resilient, and capable of generating perpetual novelty. That's not a bad list of attributes for a company of the future.' M Wheatley
'The essential purpose is to decide for oneself what is of genuine value in life. And then to find the courage to taker your own thoughts seriously Albert Einstein
'To control and sort young people for the sake of institutional efficiency is to crush the human spirit.' Ron Miller
Vision and Values
A vision without a task is a dream - a task without a vision is drudgery- but a task with vision can change the world'. Black Elk
'It is today that we create the world of the future'. Eleanor Roosevelt
'If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.' Chinese Proverb
'We can never discover new continents until we have the courage to lose sight of all coasts' Andre Gide
'The challenge of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but having new eyes'. Marcel Proust
'You cannot have a learning organisation without a shared vision...A shared vision provides a compass to keep learning on course when stress develops.' Peter Senge
'The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.' Peter Senge
'The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers'. Roland Barth
'Following the sun we left the Old World.' Christopher Columbus
'Many school are like a collection of sole charges with a shared car park!' Anon
'A school isn't good enough until it is good enough for our own children. In fact it's not only that it must be good enough for our own children but it must be the dream school we want for our children.'
H Levin Stanford Prof of Economics
In the absence of a great dream pettiness prevails. Shred visions foster risk taking, courage and innovation. Keeping the end in mind creates the confidence to make decisions even in moments of crisis.' Peter Senge
'In some ways clarifying a vision is easy. A more difficult challenge comes in facing current reality' Peter Senge
' There is no paint by numbers way to the future'. Anon
'Prediction is difficult- particularly when it involves the future.' Mark Twain
'The best way to predict the future is to invent it now.' Art Costa
Linus, 'I guess it wrong to be worried about tomorrow, maybe we should only worry about today?'
Charlie Brown, 'No, that's giving up: I'm hoping that yesterday will get better!'
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Leadership
'Briefly, leaders challenge the process because they are risk takers who capitalise on opportunities. As idealists they inspire a shared vision. They... instinctively nurture the talents and energy of colleagues. Leaders enable others to act. ...by serving as coaches and cheerleaders they encourage the heart.' Bennis
'Lead, follow or get out of the way' Anon
'I set myself as the goal the maximum capacity that people have - I settle for no less. I make myself a relentless architect of the possibilities of human beings.'
Benjamen Zander Conductor Boston
'You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from non-conformity, the ability to turn your back on old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesteryear for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We mist dare to invent the future.'
Thomas Sankara African leader
'Who shall kindle others must himself glow.' Italian Proverb
'The only thing of real importance leaders do is to create and manage cultures.' Edgar Schein
'Our schools are over-managed and under-led.' Maurice Gionotti
'The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers'. Roland Barth
'The art of leadership is keeping the herd roughly pointed west!' Anon
'Imagine that you would become a better teacher just by virtue of being on a the staff of a particular school - just from that one fact alone.' Michael Fullan
'Schools must forge greater relationships with the wider community, parents and other schools. Too many schools are working insolation. Schools need to share their power with students and the wider community.'. Fullan and Hargreaves
Change
'Change is like dancing with a gorilla you can't stop because you're tired'. Anon
'Men are not afraid of things but of how they view them.' Epictetus
Every change process that I've seen that was sustained and spread started small.'
Fast Company
'There can be little doubt that. an untapped source of human intelligence and creativity is found among the vast number of individuals in the lower socio-economic levels...the bi- products of this waste are evident.. in unemployment ...in rising crime, delinquency rates, and most important in human despair.' Renzulli
'Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs, now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is as far as he knows the only way of coming downstairs, but somewhere he feels there is another way, if only he could stop for a moment and think of it.' A A Milne
'Route and destination must be discovered through the journey if you wish to travel to new lands... the key to success lies in the creative activity of making new maps.' Stacy
'It isn't the changes that kill you its the transitions' William Bridges
'The times are a-changing and if we don't we will sink like a stone.'
Bob Dylan Lucy, 'Charlie Brown on the cruise ship of life which way is your deck chair facing?' Charlie Brown ponders and replies, 'I don't know, I've never been able to get one open'.
Schultz
'Too much educational reform and restructuring is destroying teachers confidence, draining their energy, eating up their time and taking away their hope.' Fullan and Hargreaves
'Schools are among the very few institutions that have remained almost entirely unchanged for most of this century.' Judith Aitken 99
No other organisation institution faces challenges as radical as those that will transform the school'. Peter Drucker
'We need to help the majority unlearn what has been learnt and then help them learn what needs to unfold. Futurists believe that educational and community leaders must be 'disorientated' before they are orientated. That they must unlearn to learn.' Anon
'Every organisation has to prepare for the abandonment of every thing it does. Be prepared to abandon everything, lest we have to abandon the ship.'
Peter Drucker
'Our schools are OK if were 1965!' Stoll and Fink
'Half a revolution is worse than none.' Anon
' Teachers have been virtually shell shocked by barrages of 'semi- changes' that sap the energy while making few substantial differences - and the sounds of imminent changes are almost deafening.'
Joyce and Showers
Between the idea and the reality, Between the notion and the act Falls the shadow'. T S Eliot
'The crew of the caravel Nina also saw the signs of land and a small branch covered with berries. Everyone breathed afresh and rejoiced at these signs.' Christopher Columbus
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Strategic Planning
The starting point for strategic planning is not the present but the future - a vision of where you want to be.... It is essential too that the vision is based on the guiding philosophy, core beliefs, and purpose of the organisation', ERO Report 95
Simplicity is the new competitive advantage.' Bill Jenson
'If a thing is not worth doing it is worth doing badly.' G K Chesterton
'Our lives are frittered away with detail ...simplify! simplify! simplify!' Henry Thoreau
'This bridge will take you halfway there- the last few steps you will have to take yourself.'
Shel Siverstein
'Today's Schools are not Tomorrows Schools. That's a fundamental misconception.'
David Lange
'Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school' Roland Barth
'The best we educational planners can do is to create the conditions for teachers and students to flourish and get out of their way.' Theodore Sizer
'The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!' Steven Covey
'Be in charge of your own destiny or some one else will.' Jack Welch CEO
'All life is an experiment.' Oliver Wendell Holmes
'Life is the path you beat while you walk it.' Antonio Machado/Poet
'It takes more than one person to make a path.' African saying
'School should be the best party in town.' Peter Kline
To much emphasis has been placed on reforming school from the outside through policies and mandates. Too little has been paid to how schools can be shaped from within.'
Roland Barth
'What is worth fighting for out there is ultimately about developing life lines of hope ...for all those desperately seeking a way forward.' Fullan and Hargreaves
Teaching and Learning
'The overwhelming number of teachers ...are unable to name or describe a theory of learning that underlies what they do.' Alfie Kohn
'Me te huruhuru te manu ka rere'
'It's the feathers that make the bird'
'Quality in education is what makes learning a pleasure and a joy.' Myron Tribus
'School can be a torture or an instrument of inspiration.' Higgins and Dolva
'It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather... I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanised or dehumanised.'
Haim Ginott
'In teaching students to think the emphasis is not on how many answers they know. Rather, the focus is on how well they behave when they don't know.' Art Costa
'The message we want to give to all students, "you are important, you can succeed, and we will not give up on you"'. T Patterson ASCD
'There can be no significant innovation in education that does not have at its centre the attitudes of the teachers. The beliefs, assumptions, feelings of teachers are the air of the learning environment; they determine the quality of life within it'. Postman and Weingartner
'Ano me whare pungawerewere'
'It is like the house of the spider - linked by a web (of values)'
'Education is about helping children, who are capable of self reflection and self organisation, and of enjoying a life where they explore their abundant potential'. Caine and Caine
'The guts of teaching is simple - it is the relationship between a teacher and a group of kids'
Howard Wilson
'I am always ready to learn.but I do not always like being taught.' Winston Churchill
'Going to school and getting and education are two different things; and they don't always happen at the same time.' Rosa Hill First Native Indian Physician
'Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.'
Albert Einstein
'To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.' John Dewey
The principle goal of education is to create men and woman who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done'. Jean Piaget
'We are shaped and fashioned by what we love' Goethe
'Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide' Victor Frankl
'The problem is never to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.' De Hock VISA
'You cannot teach anybody anything. You can only help them discover it within themselves.'
Galileo
'Schools should be about providing a sense of hope for all not achievement for the few.' Anon
'Schools must inquire deeper into their own practices, explore new ways to motivate their learners, make use of learning styles, introduce multiple intelligences, integrate learning, and teach thinking, and in the process discover the passion and moral purpose that makes teaching exciting and effective.'
Fullan and Hargreaves
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Creativity
'Creative people are uneasy about the status quo; they live on the edge of their competence. They place themselves in situations where they don't know what is going to happen. They accept confusion, uncertainty, and the higher risks of failure, as part of the process' David Perkins
'Try a lot of stuff - keep what works!' Anon
'To dream. To create. To accomplish. All great ideas are rejected by 'experts''. Anon
'Every discovery contains an irrational element or a creative intuition'. Karl Popper
Christopher Columbus - the worlds most famous lost man! Anon
'When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.' Pablo Picasso
'As one high school student put succinctly, "We are birds in a cage. The door opens but there is a cat outside"' John Goodland
'If you look ...at the lives of great scientists,...it is not an orderly step by step process... you get incredibly frustrated...and the Eureka! - an idea comes forth. You can't get anywhere in life unless you walk through that period of chaos'. Wheatley
'Teachers must ...regard every imperfection in the pupils comprehension not as a defect..but as a deficit in his or her own instruction, and endeavour to develop ..the ability to discover a new method of teaching.' Leo Tolstoy
'Thinking deeply about what we are doing leads us to ask better questions, break out of fruitless routines, make unexpected connections and experiment with fresh ideas.' Ron Brandt
'I want you to get excited about who you are, what you have, and what you can still be for you. I want to inspire you to see that you can go far beyond where you are right now.' Virginia Satir
Curriculum
'The rapt enjoyment on a child's face is what enjoyment is all about....unfortunately this natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time.' Csikszentmihalyi
'Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules, and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened.' Csikszentmihalyi
'Vygotsky believed that it is only when a learner is stretched beyond the comfort of his or her learning level that maximum learning will be achieved.
'A study without real content is a study art risk.' Elwyn Richardson
'I never let my schooling interfere with my learning.' Mark Twain
'Learning is not a spectator sport.' Anon
'Do not teach too many thing subjects and what you do teach thoroughly.'
A N Whitehead
' Fragmenting the curriculum, limited the nature of thinking, or forced them to rush too much for students to learn well.' Quoted by Renzulli
'Complexity means distracted effort. Simplicity means focussed effort. Edward de Bono
'Are we educating students for our past or for their future?' Anon
'Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science.'
E P Hubble
'The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner knows. Ascertain this and teach accordingly.' David Ausubel
Thinking
'The greatest unexplored territory in the world is the space between the ears.' Bill O'Brien CEO
' New technology is common, new thinking is rare.' Sir Peter Blake
'Youth is wholly experimental.' R L Stevenson
'Intellectual activity anywhere is the same whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third grade classroom.' Jerome Bruner
'The whole process of education should be thus conceived as the process of learning to think through the solutions of real problems.' John Dewey
'If you can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.' Chinese proverb
'there can be no mental development without interest.' A N Whitehead
'He aha te mea nui o te ao?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata'
'What is the most important thing in the world?
It is people, it is people , it is people.'
'Human beings are not machines. Human beings are complex adaptive systems living on the edge of the continuos ability to self-actualise. We are creative and in that creativity 'We can reinvent our own lives'. Maslow
'Our view of learning is much more like the learning of an artist or great scientist. The artist needs skills and tools....the artist armed with an idea...begins to create.. accompanied by many changes stops starts and erasers...they have a purpose that will lead somewhere that has meaning for the artist'
Caine and Caine
Activity and reflection should complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.' Csikszentmihalyi
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Achievement
'Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.' Csikszentmihalyi
'Excellence is the new forever.' Ralph Waldo Emerson
'What we want... is for students to get more interested in things, more involved in them, more engaged in wanting to know; to have projects that they can get excited about and work on over long periods of time, to be stimulated to find things out on their own.' Howard Gardner
'We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.' Howard Gardner
Giving students the power and then watching them strive for excellence is an incredible teaching experience.' Catherine Doanne
'Enthusiasm is the match that lights the candle of achievement.' William Arthur Boyd
'Nothing has happened in education until it has happened to a student.' Joseph Carroll
'To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.'
Csikszentmihalyi
'The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a rare gift. Those who possess it are ..said to have resilience or courage.' Csikszentmihalyi
' "How does one become a butterfly?" She asked pensively. "You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar".' Trina Paula
'I haven't been in long enough to retire, but I have been in too long to quit. I like the children. I want to do good job, but I don't have the room to manoeuvre. What I think about things doesn't count. My ideas are not important...The central office grinds out curriculum guides ..that no one pays any attention to... I go to school everyday. I go through the motions. I'll put my time in. But my heart is not in it.' Jack Frymier
'Something is out of whack. The bureaucratic nature of the enterprise seems to have acquired a purpose of it's own.' Jack Frymier
Classroom management
'Some classrooms are unintentionally uninviting' Harry Wong
'All battles are won before they start.' Sun Tzu
'The schools schedule is a series of units of time; the clock is king.' Theodore Sizer
'Children who grow up in ..situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feelings of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have abetter chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible.' Csikszentmihalyi
'I would caution student teachers to always be flexible with kids, but not to leave them with no structure, because many times we are the only structure these kids have.' Kouzes and Postner
'Persons are not quite the same thing as solitary individuals, nor are they a crowd. Persons are living networks of biology and emotions and memories and relationships.' Tilby
'Half of what you will accomplish in a day will be determined before you leave home. Three quarters of what you achieve will be determined before you enter the classroom door' Harry Wong
' The number one problem in the classrooms is not discipline; it is lack of authentic learning tasks, procedures and routines' Harry Wong
'In an effective classroom students should not only know what they are doing, they should also know why and how'' Harry Wong
'Schools should look behind classroom doors and determine the factors that contribute to the kinds of interactions between teachers and students that promote student achievement.' Heckman 1990
'Some initial fuss reduces subsequent fuss: that some apparently complicated initial procedures actually simplify procedures in the long run; that formal routines free the teachers for closer relationships.' Michael Marland
'Without containment, spontaneity, exhalation and freedom of the mind could seep into license and anarchy, where all day has no shape. A benign routine helps our child to gain responsibility and our school to stability.' Sylvia Ashton Warner 76
'The word 'freedom' can never be uttered unless accompanied hand in hand with the word responsibility. It is kinder to keep the lid on the school for a start, lifting it little by little, simultaneously teaching responsibility, until the time comes when the lid can be cast entirely aside and only two conditions remain - freedom and responsibility'. Sylvia Ashton Warner
'It is significant to realise that the most creative environments in our society are not the ever-changing ones. The artist's studio, the researcher's laboratory, the scholar's library are each kept deliberately simple so as to support the complexities of the work in progress. They are deliberately kept predictable so the unpredictable can happen.' Lucy Calkins
'If there is any other situations fraught with danger for mental health as that of a class held rigid by fear, it is a class exposed to the anxieties engendered by unlimited freedom. There is nothing as terrifying to the immature human being as a completely unstructured situation. Without a recognisable structure they feel the teacher has abandoned them - and so he has- to their own impulses,
all of which are by no means always constructive.' B Morris
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