Quotes by British Authors - Page 718

This is part of the answer to the riddle ofchildhood unhappiness: their minds need, and deserve, a whole world of utterly unfenceable freedom where everything has othering, everything is radiant with the possibilities ofelseness.
Jay Griffeths
My view of the charity world is that compared with business, there is too much talk, way too many meetings and expert panels and blue-ribbon commissions, and not enough action. Or as an Australian friend of mine once opined: "Sometimes you just have to have a go and get on with it, mate!".
John Wood
The only thing we wanted our young organization to give was an opportunity. We would say to children and to their families: "If you are willing to work hard and make sacrifices and think long term, then Room to Read is the best organization for you. If you're looking for a handout, then you should look elsewhere.
John Wood
We had a policy of "no looking back". Once a decision was made, all members of our team were expected to stop talking about obstacles and instead focus intensely on solutions."Don't tell us all the reasons this might not work. Tell us all the ways it could work.
John Wood
In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.
H.G.Wells
...talent is evenly distributed. You never know how many talented people are out there until you invite and inspire them to be creative.
John Wood
He couldn't be a doctor, or he would have a quieter and more persuasive manner.
Charles Dickens
This is stupid. There's work to be done. Tomorrow tens of thousands of us are going to take to the streets and demand fair access to education, and my smashed little heart shouldn't matter. But it does. The whole world is changing, and I just want to be the kind of girl who gets taken in somebody's arms.
Laurie Penny
They ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances.
Charles Dickens
I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!
Charles Dickens
He was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have returned the compliment as a pupil. He gave me no such excuse, and each of us did the other justice.
Charles Dickens
A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument
Andrew Pettegree
Correct teaching brings out human excellence.
Idries Shah
It doesn't matter the materials but what you do and how you interact. Relationships are the most important in the art of teaching. A school can have the most beautiful "stuff" but it's the care and commitment of a teacher. What matters most is a true teacher with the real stuff inside and helping others discover that real stuff inside themselves.
Jill Telford
My heart was burning for home. For a moment I felt like crying out, but at the moment of greater pain my mother's voice came back to me. It was as if she was here and talking, Stay and take an education, boy. Take it in, That's the main thing.
Michael Anthony
She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude.
Bill Bryson
Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world.
E.M. Forster
When we first arrived at the school we received an extended introduction detailing what a wonderful place it was and how lucky we were to be there. But no one explained exactly why we were to be there. Yes, we understood the general objective was to accumulate knowledge, although learning Shakespeare and algebra did not strike us as particularly helpful to our future lives. I've yet to meet a single person who found a use for algebra in later life. The excuse proffered was that it developed intelligence. It struck me as extremely unintelligent not to give us the opportunity to study subjects that would be of practical use as well as develop our intelligence. I learned Boyle's law and Ohm's law parrot fashion without having a clue as to their meaning, yet left the school five years later incapable of changing a fuse or wiring a three-pin plug. Understandably, we formed the general impression that we were there for the same reason we were sent to Sunday school – to keep us out of mischief until we were old enough to work.
Allen Carr
frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both conservative and progressive interest groups. The two major teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, each received large donations, as did the US Chamber of Commerce. Gates himself suggested that a benefit of the standards is that they open avenues towards increasing digital learning. In 2014, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Pearson to load Pearson's Common Core classroom material onto Microsoft's Surface tablet. Previously, the iPad was the classroom frontrunner; the Pearson partnership helps to make Microsoft more competitive.
Linsey McGoey
They say you can tell a lot about a country by the way it treats its prisoners…I believe the same can be said for how a country treats its children
Jill Telford
If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now -- not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground -- would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many place is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune form the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C.S. Lewis
I guess to their wide, innocent eyes it all seemed like normal family life because they had never known any different. In fact, I was the only one who had lived with anyone else, the only one that realized that life didn't have to be this terrifying and this painful all the time
Joe Peters
The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing.
Ken Robinson
You’re never going to learn something as profoundly as when it’s purely out of curiosity.
Christopher Nolan
It might, or it might not. There's two opinons to go settling that point. But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there's truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it's gibberish and not truth to me unless I know the meaning o' the words.
Elizabeth Gaskell
The radical implication of the expansion of higher education has been disguised by a myth which dubs all educated working class people as middle class. By definition working class people are not intelligent, so if you've got a degree you must be middle class. This nonsense is reinforced by the fact that acedemic traditions are laden with class assumptions and are presented in upper class styles even in the Polytechnics.
Stefan Szczelkun
If the surprise outcome of the recent UK referendum - on whether to leave or remain in the European Union - teaches us anything, it is that supposedly worthy displays of democracy in action can actually do more harm than good. Witness a nation now more divided; an intergenerational schism in the making; both a governing and opposition party torn to shreds from the inside; infinitely more complex issues raised than satisfactory solutions provided. It begs the question 'Was it really all worth it' ?
Alex Morritt
But the old traditions of sectarian misdirection still in spite of a certain advance in technical efficiency, cripple and distort the general mind. "All that has been changed," cry indignant teachers under criticism. But the evidence that this teaching of theirs still fails to produce a public that is alert, critical, and capable of vigorous readjustment in the face of overwhelming danger, is to be seen in the newspapers that satisfy the Tewler public, the arguments and slogans that appeal to it, the advertisements that succeed with it, the stuff it swallows. It is a press written by Homo Tewler for Homo Tewler all up and down the scale. The Times Tewler, the Daily Mail Tewler, the Herald, the Tribune, the Daily Worker; there is no difference except a difference in scale and social atmosphere. Through them all ran the characteristic Tewler streak of willful ignorance, deliberate disingenuousness, and self-protective illusion.
H.G.Wells
By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise.
John le Carré
The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is LIfe in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children--Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together
Alfred North Whitehead
When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things.
C.S. Lewis
I call education, not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to consolidate a firm and regular system of character; that which tends to form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that which is made up of the shreds and patches of useless arts, but that which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, trains to self-denial, and, more especially, that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, tastes, and passions, to the love and fear of God.
Hannah More
I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture.
H.G.Wells
...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.
Jane Austen
Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.
Karen Armstrong
I learned how to argue. They called it ‘Debate’. I learned how to worship. I learned how to become an eager worker and a passive consumer.But I didn’t learn anything practical, like how to purify water, build a home, start a fire, grow food, or survive without the help of corporations.
Joss Sheldon
Get your knowledge quickly and then use it. If you can use it you will retain it.
Alfred North Whitehead
The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.
Neel Burton
Tom had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the Rev. Mr Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone right into the centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths of his stick it would take to reach across the playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But Mr Stelling took no note of those things: he only observed that Tom's faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolized to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given triangles must be equal - though he could discern with great promptitude and certainty the fact that they were equal.
George Eliot
Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.
Edward Gibbon
Sorry. But it isn’t for us to change how things are. I’m just an administrator. You’re just a teacher.”“Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”“If I were you,” said Tom, “I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?
Chris Cleave
How insightful of Finland to devise a topic-based curriculum in their schools! This means that dicreet "subjects" that are taught may cross-fertilise each other, and the possibilities in this are amazing!
Suzy Davies
Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.
Neil Gaiman
Extreme excellence in music is liable to yet stronger objections; to attain it, almost every other accomplishment must be neglected; and, when attained, it leads to an improper degree of intimacy with professional people. Music softens the mind—and if a master and his pupil are continually together, bad consequence may ensure: nevertheless, I would have you know and love music; but I would not have you doat upon it.
Eliza Parsons
The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
C.S. Lewis
If you control the media, the government, the police and military, the religions, the education system, and the basic needs in life then I guess that the only thing left to control is the people.Oh...sorry, I spoke too late.
Anthony T.Hincks
Oh, it must be wonderful to be educated. What does it feel like?''It's like having an operation,' said Treece. 'You don't know you've had it until long after it's over.
Malcolm Bradbury
A happy childhood can fortify one against the ravages of life, and part of that happiness is found in books, which become our constant companions for the rest of our lives.
Suzy Davies
Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince," she said, sounding sad, "but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lesson that way - albeit all the harder for their parents' earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.""To do nothing is always easy." Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice."To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.
Ian M. Banks
The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that pupils take away from school, but their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.
Richard Livingstone
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It is particularly important to note that, in a democracy, education has never been concerned only with supplying the needs of the economy or ensuring effective socialisation; it also has strong traditions of preparing for citizenship, extending possibilities for learning and promoting social progress.
Gaby Weiner
She was not an unkind woman, despite a lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education, but she was conscientious and a stickler for propriety and thought she knew how this sort of thing should go and was vaguely annoyed that it wasn't going.
Terry Pratchett
What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.
Dorothy L. Sayers
But if I'm useless only because I haven't been properly educated, is that my fault?
Richard Aldington
A student should not be taught more than he can think about.
Alfred North Whitehead
In truth, the history of political thought is an end in itself, the highest peak of political education. The crowning achievement of political knowledge, it will be argued in these pages, consists precisely in the ability to partake of the visions of man, society and the state to be found in the writings of our most eminent thinkers, in the ability to enjoy political 'conversation' at its highest level and in its longest historical expanse. This ability is not (or not obviously) an 'aid' to any other aspect of the study of politics, and it should not be construed as one; on the contrary, it is these other aspects (institutions and behaviour for example) which should be seen as so many intellectual aids facilitating our comprehension of the history of political thought.
Robert Nandor Berki
But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?
Chris Cleave
I no longer believe that the current education system is able to equip our children for a fast-moving future. Technology has evolved so rap-idly in the last five years that to put a child in an education system that was designed for a future that will most likely no longer exist for the majority, seems almost absurd.
Lehla Eldridge