English Teachers Day Thoughts

"Let the soldier be abroad if he will, he can do nothing in this age. There is another personage, a personage less imposing in the eyes of some, perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in full military array"

"Delightful task! to rear the tender Thought, To teach the young Idea how to shoot, To pour the fresh Instruction o'er the Mind, To breathe the enlivening Spirit, and to fix The generous urpose in the glowing breast"

"A man's scholarship may be perfect, his character admirable, and yet, for want of the power to control subordinates and govern boys, he may be wholly unfit for a schoolmaster"

"Charles Xavier : A new generation of mutants is emerging, that much is certain. They will be called freaks. Genetic monstrosities. [...] But they are emerging in the inner cities, in the suburbs, in the deserts and the jungles. And when they emerge, they will need teachers, people who can help them overcome their anger and show them how to use their strange gifts responsibly. They will need us"

"Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes; Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. * * * * * A blockhead with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice"

"For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. [...] There was no Plato without Socrates , and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis"

"A good teacher does not draw out; he gives out, and what he gives out is love. And by love I mean approval, or if you like, friendliness, good nature. The good teacher not only understands the child: he approves of the child"

"Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test; we know that's not true"

"Since human beings are highly adaptable it may be possible for an individual with any sort of competence to learn, in the end, according to any teaching strategy. But the experiments show, very clearly indeed, that the rate, quality and durability of learning is crucially dependent upon whether or not the teaching strategy is of a sort that suits the individual"

"In a democratic state the schoolmaster is afraid of his pupils and flatters them, and the pupils despise both schoolmaster and pedagogues. The young expect the same treatment as the old, and contradict them and quarrel with them. In fact, seniors have to flatter their juniors, in order not to be thought morose old dotards"

"Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom"

"What they did was sell invisible things. And after they’d sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t even know it was locked"