“The central challenge for educational systems around the world is the substitution of effectiveness for popularity.”
“I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent s duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for those dead but sceptred spirits ; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter s Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis s Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner - then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows - The deficiency is there, sir-there; and here, he added, touching the upper sides of my head, here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep. I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred - hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. ( The Lifted Veil )”
“At school, everything feels weird. No one looks at me or pays attention to me, no one says hi, no one asks how I am feeling, and everyone is so quite. It’s like I don’t even exist.”
“Suddenly, Tara s accomplishment was clear. She had lined up allies among the school s various groups and got them all to work together for probably the first time in the school s history. She was like a master builder who could bend materials like stone and steel and clay to her will... except her materials were flesh and spirit.”
“It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.”
“I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.”
“Nobody in school is stronger than me. But when Sally Holmes kissed me, I never felt so weak in all my life.”
“You show me a school with a principal behind the desk, and I ll show you a school without principal leadership. (Quoting Baruti Kafele)”
“Schools kill time and creativity. Find ways to workaround these limitations”
“That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren t enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at.”
“Where s my bed?! Dairine shrieked. It s on Pluto, Nita said. On the winter side, somewhere nice and dark and quiet, where you won t find it if you look all day-which you re not going to have time to do, becaus you ll be in school.”
“There’s a huge difference for taking responsibility for one’s actions, and taking credit, and in this scenario I think we need to give credit where credit is due. I won’t take responsibility for my teacher’s drinking problem, but I will take credit for it.”
“It wasn t school that I dreaded at all. School was not half bad. In many ways, this year had been downright fun. No, what I hated most about school was the fact that I had to come here all by myself. Simon and Peter went to their classes and did their own things, and I had to do my own thing. The thing I loved about summer was that I shared it with my brothers. Sure, my brothers and I often fought, but the best times in my life came when I was with them. School was a time when I had to go and do something without a brother at my side.”
“The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we re herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we re supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can t even piss when we have to. That s how we learn to be plastic and dumb.”
“Most of the students there, he said, don t know what they think. You tell em, they ll think it. I plan to tell em.”
“Education is the preparation of a child intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically for life and for eternity.”
“The quality of the relationships that students have in class with their peers and teachers is important to their success in school.”