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Educating America
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.
—John Dewey (1859-1952), Author
Democracy and Education
The dawn of centuries has always been a good time to explore creativity. In 1601, for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets were published, Cervantes’ Don Quixote went to print, and Bach, Handel and Domenico Scarlatti were born. Within the first few years of the past century we had the discovery of the electron, heavier than air flight, the discovery of X-rays, and numerous other developments in the sciences and arts. There is no reason to think that the coming years will be any less exciting than those clustered around the start of other centuries. If anything, the next few years will be even more thrilling.
—David Thornburg, Founder
The Thornburg Center
Education is about learning to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity. It is about learning to savor the quality of the journey. It is about inquiry and deliberation. It is about becoming critically minded and intellectually curious, and it is about learning how to frame and pursue your own educational aims.
—Elliot W. Eisner, Stanford University
What we need to talk about openly in debates about schooling is not whether a traditional school is better or worse than a progressive school but whether each cultivates civic virtues. Current talk about standards-based reform, test scores, more technology, and accountability is not about this core goal of schooling.
—Larry Cuban, Stanford University
School is not a place for important people who do not need to learn and unimportant people who do. Instead, school is a place where students discover, and adults rediscover, the joys, the difficulties, and the satisfactions of learning.
—Roland S. Barth, Founder
Harvard Principal Center
Powerful people take the jobs that entrust them with the important things. If you want good people in the teaching profession, you have to set it up so teachers have authority over the important things…. Listen to the good teachers. They talk about pay, yes. But they talk more passionately about the fact that other people are telling them what to do. I would say the heart of the matter is substantial control over time and materials; pay follows that.
—Theodore R. Sizer, Founder
Coalition of Essential Schools
Public education’s ostensible mission, the development of an intelligent populace and a popular intelligence, requires that all individuals have access to education that prepares them to debate and decide among competing ideas, to weigh the individual and the common good, and to make judgments that sustain democratic institutions and ideals.
—Linda Darling-Hammond
Stanford University
There is a much more sensible approach to improving education; in fact, I believe it is the only approach likely to be effective in the long run. That is to produce a cohort of teachers who believe they are professionals, who act like professionals, and who are treated as professionals.
—Howard Gardner
Harvard University
Evidence is mounting to suggest that the school’s limitations are much less severe in teaching the fundamentals of reading, writing, and figuring—the so-called basics—than in teaching more complex abilities. We live in an era of rapidly expanding opportunities to acquire information but of constricting opportunities to reflect, engage in sustained discourse with others, and clarify our beliefs about the times and circumstances in which we live. If our schools need improvements in the basics, they need—perhaps more—a fresh examination of their role in a society undergoing rapid change.
—John I. Goodlad
Center for Educational Renewal
University of Washington
The features of our children’s classrooms that we find the most reassuring—largely because we recognize them from our own days in school—typically turn out to be those least likely to help students become effective and enthusiastic learners.
—Alfie Kohn, educational theorist
I like to think of a good classroom as a kind of ménage à trois in which there is the teacher, the student, and the subject matter. The teacher loves both the subject and the student, and the kind of love that really makes learning happen is where you try to introduce two things you love to one another. In a sense you introduce them and get yourself out of the way so they can forge a relationship of their own.
—Parker J. Palmer, Founder, Fetzer
Institute Teacher Formation Program
It is often asserted that public schools are change resistant. This is not so. There is in fact so much change occurring in schools that teachers and school administrators rightly feel overwhelmed by it. However, this change is seldom accompanied by clear improvements in performance. Schools are change prone, but they are also change inept.
—Phillip C. Schlechty, Founder, Center
for Leadership in School Reform
All children must learn to care for other human beings, and all must find an ultimate concern in some center of ...
