30 Quotes Celebrating Teachers—The Caretakers Of Our Future

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Excerpt: This list of 30 Quotes for Teachers is about uplifting (and celebrating) those remarkable individuals who have shaped (and will continue to shape) our world—present and future. Enjoy!

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Introduction: Cheers To Teachers!

As handlers of minds, teachers have the incredibly complex task of figuring out how to best prepare students for the world ahead—in their subject of expertise and out. What’s learned in the classroom should, hopefully, transcend the classroom and carry over into the rest of each student’s life. And if you think back to where you are today, you’ll undoubtedly attribute much of who you are, how you act, what you know, and how you got to where you are to some of the remarkable teachers in your life.

This list of 30 quotes is about celebrating those remarkable individuals who, not only shaped your life, but have shaped the lives of everybody else in the world and are continuing to shape the lives of our next generation. Teachers are, as Lowell Milken states below, the sunlight and oxygen of the future—the indispensable element on which everything else is built. And without them, our future would be lost.

So, here’s to teachers! Here’s to continuing to fight the good fight to condense the lessons of the world into small classrooms with small budgets and massive expectations. Here’s to the individuals who take their job as an educator seriously and go above and beyond for those young malleable minds who show up to their classrooms each and every school day. And here’s to being the resilient and flexible fighters that they are in learning how to adapt and overcome in even the most challenging of circumstances, so that our future may remain bright.

I hope these insights find them well and keep them fueled up to fight another day (or a thousand more days). And if you’re one of those people, thank you for all that you do.

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9 Quotes on Teaching

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“Good teachers are to education what education is to all other professions—the indispensable element, the sunlight and oxygen, the foundation on which everything else is built.”

Lowell Milken

“Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions.”

Unknown

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

Albert Einstein

“If there’s information that can be written down, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up.  We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number or sharpen an ax.  (Worth stopping for a second and reconsidering the revolutionary nature of that last sentence.)  What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better.  If all the teacher is going to do is read her pre-written notes from a PowerPoint slide to a lecture hall of thirty or three hundred, perhaps she should stay home.  Not only is this a horrible disrespect to the student, it’s a complete waste of the heart and soul of the talented teacher.  Teaching is no longer about delivering facts that are unavailable in any other format.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.”

Alexandra K. Trenfor

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”

Socrates

“Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.”

Josef Albers

“The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask which he finds it hard to answer.”

Alice Wellington Rollins

“Your work is not to drag the world kicking and screaming into a new awareness. Your job is to simply do your work… sacredly, secretly, silently … and those with “eyes to see and ears to hear’ will respond.”

The Arturians

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10 Quotes On School and Education:

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“‘Let us pick up our books and our pens,‘ I said. ‘They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.’”

Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious… Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.”

Dalai Lama

“Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.”

W. B. Yeats

“As soon as we associate reading a book with taking a test, we’ve missed the point.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“What we can’t do is digitize passion.  We can’t force the student to want to poke around and discover new insights online.  We can’t merely say, ‘here,’ and presume the students will do the hard (and scary) work of getting over the hump and conquering their fears.  Without school to establish the foundation and push and pull our students, the biggest digital library in the world is useless.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“The two pillars of a future-proof education: Teach kids how to lead; help them learn how to solve interesting problems.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“School is at its best when it gives students the expectation that they will not only dream big, but dream dreams that they can work on every day until they accomplish them – not because they were chosen by a black-box process but because they worked hard enough to reach them.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“We can teach people to desire lifelong learning, to express themselves, and to innovate.  And just as important, it’s vital we acknowledge that we can unteach bravery and creativity and initiative.  And that we have been doing just that.  School has become an industrialized system, working on a huge scale, that has significant by-products, including the destruction of many of the attitudes and emotions we’d like to build our culture around.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”

Todd Bodett

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11 Quotes On Properly Guiding the Next Generation:

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“People may teach what they know, but they reproduce what they are.”

John C. Maxwell, Leadership Gold

“If you say to one flower, ‘Grow,’ but you water another, the first one won’t grow.”

Stephen Covey, The 8th Habit

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

Chinese Proverb

“It is easier to build up a child than it is to repair an adult.”

Unknown

“The way we speak to our child[ren] matters, for those words travel beyond their ears, settling into the creases of their hearts and the crevices of their self-worth.”

Unknown

“Teaching our children to control themselves is far more effective than trying to control our children. Model, don’t manipulate. Lead, don’t intimidate. Support, don’t shame. Encourage, don’t threaten. Guide, don’t punish. Listen, don’t lecture.”

L. R. Knost

“I never yelled at my players much. That would have been artificial stimulation, which doesn’t last very long. I think it’s like love and passion. Passion won’t last as long as love. When you are dependent on passion, you need more and more of it to make it work. It’s the same with yelling.”

John Wooden

“In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet, if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk.”

Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

“Most learning, especially most organizational learning, occurs through trial and error.  Error occurs whether you want it to or not.  Error is difficult to avoid.  It’s not clear that research or preparation have an enormous impact on error, especially marketing error.  Error is clearly not in short supply.  Trial, on the other hand, is quite scarce, especially in some organizations.  People mistakenly believe that one way to successfully avoid error is to avoid trial.  We need more trial.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

“Instead of praising those people who happen to possess some piece of knowledge, we ought to praise those who have the right attitude towards it, since only this benchmark also includes those who strive for the truth and miss out on it for reasons not entirely under their control. Consider traits such as intellectual humility (a willingness to be wrong), intellectual courage (to pursue truths that make us uncomfortable), open-mindedness (to contemplate all sides of the argument, limiting preconceptions), and curiosity (to be continually seeking).”

Jonny Robinson, Aeon

“When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.  When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.  When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.  When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.  And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.”

Seth Godin, Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?

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