Pedagogy Quotes

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”
― Confucius, The Sayings of Confucius

“Now, it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.”
― Charles S. Peirce

“Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.”
― Seymour Papert, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer

“From the will of a freedom-fighter, Farzad Kamangar:
"Is it possible to be a teacher and not show the path to the sea to the little fish of the country?
Is it possible to carry the heavy burden of being a teacher and be responsible for spreading the seeds of knowledge and still be silent? Is it possible to see the lumps in the throats of the students and witness their thin and malnourished faces and keep quiet? …
I cannot imagine witnessing the pain and poverty of the people of this land and fail to give our hearts to the river and the sea, to the roar and the flood.”
― Samad Beh-Rang

“To create a community where faith matters not just in theory but in reality, faith has to be a public value, not just a private one.”
― Donna Freitas, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses

“The Manual teaches the operation partly by being produced through the operation.”
― John Stack IV

“A Theory says: This is what we think is happening.

A Instruction Manual says: Here is how you can perform the operation yourself.”
― John Stack IV

“T1: Language.

When the ineffable wants articulation, JSIV, Sophia, and Galahad are not only doing that right now, they're penning an Instruction Manual on how to do so.”
― John Stack IV

“A Facilitator need not become the Subject.”
― John Stack IV

“A Facilitator who understands Timing, Language, Sequence, Attention, Perspective, and Restraint can alter enormously what Becomes Possible.”
― John Stack IV

“Artifact first; interpretation second.
Preserve the object before improving the story.”
― John Stack IV

“Not Yet is a valid result.
Possibility is not promotion; ambiguity is not failure.”
― John Stack IV

“The Method wins by refusing to rig The Game.”
― John Stack IV

“A successful vehicle does not merely preserve information. It helps create the Receiving State in which the information can cross.”
― John Stack IV

“The metronome of our inquiries and methods is singular, constant, residing in rhythm with my heart’s beating rhythm, which I openly share with you . . .

Others may not understand it, not yet, nor are they required to . . .

Our metronome keeps a steady pace when others possibly want to hear it . . .

The Door is open, always has been . . .

Come right this way, if you please . . .”
― John Stack IV

“The Metronome Principle:
The constancy of an inquiry resides not in constancy of conclusion, but in constancy of method. Observation may change the hypothesis; contradiction may change the model; new evidence may reopen a conclusion previously considered settled. The rhythm remains: distinguish observation from interpretation, interpretation from inference, inference from evidence, and evidence from proof. Preserve provenance. Seek counterexamples. Permit falsification. Revise without erasing the path by which revision became necessary.”
― John Stack IV

“The Door remains open because the inquiry remains open.”
― John Stack IV

“Narrowing often occurs because something missed.
The broader horizon exists because we kept looking from the place where it missed.”
― John Stack IV

“A preserved Miss is a vehicle by which error carries knowledge into its next state.
Every genuine, preserved Miss becomes a Hit on the inquiry.
It can miss the target and hit the map.”
― John Stack IV

“HOMEWORK, n. A regular exercise that pushes privileged kids ahead of those from broken homes.”
― Jonas Koblin, The Unschooler's Educational Dictionary: A Lighthearted Introduction to the World of Education and Curriculum-Free Alternatives

“Think about it—what does school really teach? Memorization. Who was born when, when they died, what happened when, who is who, what is what. That’s enough to pass exams, get a degree, and land a job. But does it teach you to think?”
― Mason Carter, A Philosophy of Scars: A Story of Broken Hearts and Overthinking Minds

“What I'm here for is to work with the material, and to work with it the best way that I can. And in doing that I don't have to be fearful about my grade, because if I am working the best I can with this material, I know it's going to be reflected in my grade.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Many professors are not interested in engaged pedagogy because they fear "burn-out." I've been teaching for almost twenty years and I am right now in my first year leave—an unpaid leave—but it's my first real time off. And I feel the lack of time off has been damaging to my teaching. There has to be a recognition of the way the failing economy is taking jobs. There has to be more of an emphasis on job-sharing and job-switching in the interest of creating an environment where engaged teaching can be sustained.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“During my college years it was tacitly assumed that we all agreed that class should not be talked about, that there would be no critique of the bourgeois class biases shaping and informing pedagogical process (as well as social etiquette) in the classroom. Although no one ever directly stated the rules that would govern our conduct, it was taught by example and reinforced by a system of rewards. As silence and obedience to authority were most rewarded...”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“All too often, students from nonmaterially privileged backgrounds assume a position of passivity—they be have as victims, as though they can only be acted upon against their will. Ultimately, they end up feeling they can only reject or accept the norms imposed upon them. This either/or often sets them up for disappointment and failure.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Readers my age were made to memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky? Isn't a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy? In a course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn't it true that nothing is gained except the absence of suffering?... What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?”
― Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“What the normal child continuously needs is not so much isolated moral lessons instilling in him the importance of truthfulness and honesty, or the beneficent results that follow from some particular act of patriotism, etc. It is the formation of habits of social imagination and conception”
― John Dewey, The Political Writings

“Most pedagogues male, and the overwhelming majority of the female ones, are not even Ph.D.’s. They are simply dull persons who have found it easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out. At this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or folly, and always with enthusiasm. The schools reek with this puerile nonsense. Their programs of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols, by quack psychology out of the uplift. No one ever hears of a pedagogue protesting against this bilge. The profession is almost completely lacking in professional conscience.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

“No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”
― Paulo Freire