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'Keep
me away from the wisdom which does not cry,
the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children' ~Kahlil Gibran~ |
'It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry'
Albert Einstein
Choosing a school for a child is one of the most imprtant decisions parents make. The school - its teachers, curriculum, educational philosophy, and values both explicit and implicit - will affect the child's day-to-day life. It will help shape the child's personality, view of life, behavior, and destiny as an adult. And it will also deeply affect the lives of the parents and the life of the family as a whole'
Ronald Koetzsch
The key is curiosity, and it is curiosity, not answers that we model. As we seek to know more about a child, we demonstrate the acts of observing, listening, questioning and wondering. When we are curious about a child's words and our responses to those words, the child feels respected. The child is respected. "What are the ideas that I have that are so interesting to the teacher? I must be somebody with good ideas.
Vivian Paley
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' The pleasure of learning and knowing, and of understanding, is one of the most important and basic feelings that every child expects from the experiences he confronts alone, with other children or with adults. It is a crucial feeling which must be reinforced so that the pleasure survives even when reality may prove that learning, knowing and understanding involve difficulty and effort' Loris Malaguzzi |
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The
Central Paradox
"Most of us are earning more money and living better than we (or our parents) did a quarter of a century ago around the time when some of those technologies on which the new economy is based - the micro chip, the personal computer, the internet - first emerged. You'd think, therefore, that it would be easier, not harder, to attend to the part of our lives that exists outside paid work. Yet by most measures we're working longer and more frantically than before, and the time and energy for our non-working lives are evaporating." The Future of Success; Robert Reich, 1991 |
' The flow model suggests that the mastery of any skill or body of knowledge should ideally happen naturally, as the child is drawn to the areas that spontaneously engage her - that, in essence, she loves. That initial passion can be the seed for high levels of attainment, as the child comes to realize that pursuing the field - whether it be dance, math or music - is a source of the flow. And since it takes pushing the limits of one's ability to sustain the flow, that becomes a prime motivator for getting better and better; it makes the child happy...Pursuing flow through learning is a more humane, natural, and very likely more effective way to marshal emotions in the service of education'
Daniel Goleman
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'Education must no longer be regarded only as a matter of teaching children, but as a social question of the highest importance, because it is the one question that concerns all mankind. The many other social questions have to do with one group or another of adults, with relatively small numbers of human beings; the social question of the child, however, has to do with all men everywhere' Maria Montessori |
Marcuse
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' We know that children are capable of peak experiences and that they happen frequently during childhood. We also know that the present school system is an extremely effective instrument for crushing peak experiences and forbidding their possibility' Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi |
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'The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them' Jules Henry |
'All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is
forever a pupil'
Abraham Maslow
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' If formal instruction is introduced too early, too intensely and too abstractly, the children may indeed learn the instructed knowledge and skills, but they may do so at the expense of the disposition to use them' Lilian Katz |
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'The Individual who sees himself and his situation clearly and who freely takes responsibility for that self and for that situation is a very different person from one who is simply in the grip of outside circumstances. This difference shows up clearly in important aspects of his behaviour' Carl Rogers |
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' The language of education, if it is to be an invitation to reflection and culture creating, cannot be the so-called uncontaminated language of fact and 'objectivity'. It must express stance and must invite counter-stance, and in the process leave place for reflection, for meta-cognition. It is this that permits one to reach higher ground, this process of objectifying in language or image what one has thought and then turning around and re-considering it" Jerome Bruner |
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Children come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is dead, or at least silent' John Holt |
'Human nature has been sold short. Man has a higher nature, just as 'instinctoid' as his lower nature, and this human nature includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile, and for preferring to do it well'
Abraham Maslow
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'In my view, if we are to encompass adequately the realm of human cognition, it is necessary to include a far wider and more universal set of competences than has ordinarily been considered. And it is necessary to remain open to the possibility that many - if not most - of these competences do not lend themselves to measurement by standard verbal methods, which rely very heavily on a blend of logic and linguistic abilities' Howard Gardner |
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Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialised abilities for thinking about a variety of things Lev Vygotsky |
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We adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do. We destroy this capacity above all by making them afraid' John Holt |
'We need to cultivate…an atmosphere of reciprocal help and socialization. Implicit in this is a decisive response to a child's need to feel whole. Feeling whole is a biological and cultural necessity for the child (and also for the adult). It is a vital state of well-being'
Loris Malaguzzi
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'The teacher must orient his work not on yesterday's development in the child but on tomorrow's' Lev Vygotsky |
'If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him - or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them..The more children feel valuable, the more they will then begin to say things of value. They will rise to your experience of them'
M.Scott Peck
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'The more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you. And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become' M.Scott Peck |
'The ideal university would have no formal credits, required courses or degrees. It would serve as an educational retreat where people could explore various subjects, discover their own true interests and identities, and appreciate the joys of learning and the preciousness of life'
Abraham Maslow
'Out task,
regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains,
as high as possible'
Loris Malaguzzi
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'Teachers - like children and everyone else - feel the need to grow in their competences; they want to transform experiences into thoughts, thoughts into reflections, and reflections into new thoughts and new actions. They also feel a need to make predictions, to try things out, and to interpret them...Teachers must learn to interpret ongoing processes rather than wait to evaluate results.' Loris Malaguzzi |
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'Physical, emptional, intellectual and spiritual growth are interrelated, and the optimal educational environment stimulates and nurtures the intuitive as well as the rational, the imaginative as well as the practical and the creative as well as the receptive functions of each individual' Transpersonal Education |
'A child's curiosity and desire to do things himself are the definition of his capacity to learn without sacrificing any part of his whole development. Guidance can only heighten certain abilities at the expense of others, but nothing can heighten the full spectrum of his capabilities beyond its in-built limits. The price a child pays for being guided into what others think best for him (or themselves) is the diminution of his wholeness'
Jean Liedloff
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'Each of us has within us a source of understanding and wisdom that knows who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. It is in tune with our unfolding purpose and sense clearly the next steps to be taken to fulfill this purpose' The Psycosynthesis Education Trust |
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' Each person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint. There are no two people alike...no two people who understand the same sentence the same way...So in dealing with people try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be' Milton Erickson |
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' Only a person strongly motivated by a belief will be liable to enter into and persist in an action. Why? Because belief is anchored in a need. Knowledge alone of a path or activity will not necessarily trigger action, because it is not anchored in a need of the individual' Reuven Feuerstein |
'We have seen that instruction and development do not coincide. They are two different processes with very complex interrelationships. Instruction is only useful when it moves ahead of development. When it does it impels or wakens a whole series of functions that are in a state of maturation lying in the zone of proximal development'
Lev Vygotsky
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'The restructuring of information and knowledge will involve a profound transformation of our system of education. Indeed this transformation too is well on its way...Although the movements sometimes fail to communicate and cooperate with one another,they all go in the same direction. In their concerns for social justice, ecological balance, self-realization, and spirituality, they emphasize different aspects of the gradually emerging new vision of reality' Fritjof Capra |
'People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong'
Albert Bandura
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