This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The mind is never passive; it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus. You cannot postpone its life until you have sharpened it. Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here and now; whatever powers you are strengthening in the pupil, must be exercised here and now; whatever possibilities of mental life your teaching should impart, must be exhibited here and now. That is the golden rule of education, and a very difficult rule to follow.
Education | Golden Rule | Life | Life | Mind | Rule | Golden Rule |
True love begins when nothing is looked for in return. And if the habit of prayer is seen to be so important for teaching a man to love his fellow men, this is because no answer is given to his prayers. Your love is based on hatred when you wrap yourself up in a certain man or woman on whom you batten as a stock of food laid by and, like dogs snarling at teach other round their trough, you fall to hating anyone who casts even a glance at your repast. you call it love, this selfish appetite. No sooner is love bestowed on you than (even as in your false friendships) you convert this free gift into servitude and bondage and, from the very moment you are loved, you begin to fancy yourself wronged.
Appetite | Habit | Important | Love | Man | Men | Nothing | Prayer | Servitude | Teach | Woman |
Intellectual virtues owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit... From this fact it is plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.
Birth | Experience | Growth | Habit | Nature | Nothing | Reason | Time | Virtue | Virtue |
Instead of developing the child’s own faculties of discernment, and teaching it to judge and think for itself, the teacher uses all his energies to stuff its head full of the ready-made thoughts of other people.
Discernment | People | Teacher | Think |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope that it so seldom achieves a great result. The wish to preserve the past rather than to hope of creating the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young.
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
In teaching there should be no class distinctions.
War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert their natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very nature of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity, whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved.
Body | Charity | Danger | Equity | Justice | Light | Manners | Nature | Obligation | People | Politics | Rage | Taste | War | Danger |
The method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.
Method |
Life hands us lessons, universal truths teaching us the basics about love, fear, time, power, loss, happiness, relationships, (guilt, anger, forgiveness, surrender, patience, play, loss) and authenticity. We are not unhappy today because of the complexities of life. We are unhappy because we miss its underlying simplicities.
Anger | Authenticity | Fear | Forgiveness | Guilt | Life | Life | Love | Patience | Play | Power | Surrender | Time | Truths |
The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.
It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
The core prescription for happiness and meaning handed down through all the world’s spiritual teaching is unchanging: Remember the source with gratitude, and love one another. In this way the meaning of life as an interconnected web of love and compassion becomes manifest in even the most seemingly mundane moments.
Compassion | Gratitude | Life | Life | Love | Meaning | World | Happiness |
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
Everything I learn about teaching I learn from bad students.
Learn |
Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual and difficult work, to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise, but above all - by example.
Education | Example | Kindness | Literature | Lust | Means | People | Praise | Precept | Training | Warning | Work | Youth | Youth |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
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.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
We have ignored for half a century or more the studies that show some 95 percent of all a child’s learning or “structures of knowledge” form automatically in direct response to interactions with the environment, while only 5 percent form as a result of our verbal teaching or intellectual instruction.