These two-dozen thoughts from various scholars, writers, and thinkers have us ponder the situation and purpose of teaching. As the quotations jostle, complement, and contradict each other, their philosophies may provoke us to think through and articulate our own classroom ideals.
Two-Dozen Micro-Philosophies for Thinking Through Your Teaching:
Do we as faculty practice education as a way to free students or control them?”
-Kelly J. Baker
The job of a university is not to make ideas safe for students but to make students safe for ideas.”
-Clark Kerr
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.”
-John Ciardi
Every student needs someone who says, simply, “You mean something. You count.””
-Tony Kushner
[O]ur very ability to think depends on contrast – on asking ‘as opposed to what?’”
-Gerald Graff
A great speaker makes you want to be a better person.”
-Carmine Gallo
I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It’s the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.”
-Cornel West
One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water.”
-Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker)
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.”
-Antonio Porchia
Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human. . . . A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not resumes.”
-William Deresiewicz
Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.”
-W. E. B. Du Bois
Over a long period of time, the main force in favor of greater equality has been the diffusion of knowledge and skills.”
-Thomas Piketty
A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron.”
-Horace Mann
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
-Victor Hugo
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.”
-Lee Iacocca
We are built to learn together, to share what we know.”
-Matthew Lieberman
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.”
-Japanese proverb
A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.”
-Thomas Carruthers
The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”
-Maria Montessori
I am the teacher of athletes,
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”
-Walt Whitman
If students can’t learn to judge the quality of their own work, then they haven’t really learned.”
-Paul Travis
I don’t care what they say: It is possible to write and teach at the same time. In fact, I have a hard time writing without teaching (sabbaticals are always disastrous interludes for me, a time when I tend to sink into depression, writing more slowly, thinking a lot less clearly). Teaching organizes my life, gives a structure to my week, puts before me certain goals: classes to conduct, books to reread, papers to grade, meetings to attend. I move from event to event, having a clear picture in my head of what I must do next. Without the academic calendar in front of me, I feel lost.”
-Jay Parini
[T]he most beneficial result of asking our students ‘So what?’ and ‘Who cares?’ would be that academics ask these questions more frequently of ourselves”
-Gerald Graff
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
-Henry Adams