Educational Quotes 8: Curriculum

Schools have been trying to implement impossible curriculums based on a technocratic accountability model. The future demands students who retain a love of learning - students with their talents, dreams and passions developed. To achieve these demands a new appreciation of what a curriculum for the future should be.
 
 
'If we don't encourage others to find their own meaning, their own voice, we will never be able to sustain our own. Freedom comes from following you own voice not following another's' Peter Block
 
'If we wish to present ourselves to the wider world as New Zealanders then we must be able to listen to our own voices, and trace our own footsteps; we must have our own heroes and heroines inspire us; we must persist with building our own culture with the ingredients close to hand and not import theses ingredients ready made from abroad'. The late Michael King NZ Historian
 
'There is, it seems, more concern about whether children learn the mechanics of reading and writing than grow to love reading and writing; learn about democracy than have practice in democracy; hear about knowledge... rather than gain experience in personally constructing knowledge... see the world narrowly, simple and ordered, rather than broad complex and uncertain'. Vitto Perrone, 'Letter to Teachers'
 
'Standardization, the great ally of mediocrity, wins out over imagination.' Sergiovanni
 
'There is something about the Procrustean bed about schools; some children are left disabled by being hacked about to fit the curriculum; some are stretched to take up the available space, others less malleable are labeled as having special educational needs.' Chris Bowring-Carr and John Burnham West
 
'The constant need to move on, and to document progress, in normal schools means that education tends to be cut up into bite sized task..' Guy Claxton in 'Wise -Up'
 
'Teaching is impossible. If we simply add together all that is expected of a typical teacher... the sum makes greater demands than any individual can possibly fulfill'. Lee Shulman Stanford Univ
 
'If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?' Gloria Steinem US Feminist
 
'Could it be that the current education reforms have not yet fully dealt with what teaching and learning are all about? In a word, yes.' Peyton Williams ASCD President 2003
 
'We must beware of needless innovation, especially when guided by logic.' Winston Churchill
 
'How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?' John Dewey
 
Many school focus too much on achievement... (they need) to create opportunities for young people develop their learning muscles and their learning stamina through working on real problems... to reflect on and manage their own learning.' Guy Claxton
 
'Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly.' Alfred North Whitehead
 
'You have to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something they can think about in lots of different ways,' Howard Gardner
 
'The real process of education should be the process of learning to think through the application of real problems.' John Dewey
 
'All the arts are brothers, each one throwing a light unto the others.' Voltaire
 
'Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.' e e cummings us poet
 
'Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that does not mean we deserve to conquer the universe.' Kurt Vonnegut Jnr Author
 
'What we want to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.' G B Shaw
 
'The first people had questions, and they were free. The second people had answers, and they became enslaved.' Wind Eagle American Indian Chief
 
 
 
'The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.' Tracey Kidder
 
'Everything depends on the quality of the experience which is had.' John Dewey
 
'The central problem of an education based on experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experience.' John Dewey
 
'Of course schools should be accountable- but accountable for what?... I would like to see schools accountable for developing students who have a love of learning - who are continually growing in wisdom and in their ability to function effectively( and happily) in the world.' Judy Yero http://www.teachersmind.com/
 
'We must not entrust the future of our children to habit.' Judy Yero
 
.Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.' Barbara Kingsolver
 
'A teacher cannot build a community of learners unless the voices and lives of the students are an integral part of the curriculum.' Peterson 94
 
'The curriculum is to be thought of in terms activity and experience rather than knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored.' Haddow Report UK 1931
 
'The main function of the school... lies in offering opportunities and an environment in which a child can explore freely, along many lines, and create in many media. In doing he will utilize his natural instinctive energies in the acquiring of skills and the building of interests.' Froebel Publication 1949
 
'Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.' Howard Gardner
 
'the intuitive, the expressive, the un-measurable, the intensely personal have never found a satisfactory place in the curriculum, in assessment, in the publics esteem.' Hedley Beare Prof of Educ Melbourne
 
( Because) it is the intellect which dominates schooling ... the specifically soul making subjects- literature, drama, music, the visual arts- are progressively 'de-souled' as the child progresses through school' Dr Bernie Neville Aust Educator
 
'how we picture ourselves, the language we use about ourselves and our family, the stories we tell about ourselves or which we allow others to tell, whom we compare ourselves with, what we think we will become, how we define our own universe, these are the raw material from which we spin our web of personal mythology'. Hedley Beare Aust Educator
 
'Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body's immune system.' Howard Gardner
 
'Treat people as if they were what they might be, and you will help them become capable of being.' Goethe
 
'We should train ourselves not to ask 'How intelligent he/she is?' but 'Which intelligence doe he/she have most of?.' Charles Handy
 
'Thinking precedes literacy and numeracy but nowhere in the curriculum is that recognized.' Mc Gavin, Glasgow University
 
'We have to... immerse ourselves in interactive, real life, complex experiences out of which we can process new lives' Caine and Caine 97
 
'We should see schools as safe arenas for experimenting with life, for discovering our talents... for taking responsibity for tasks and others people, for learning how to learn... and for exploring our beliefs about life and society.' Charles Handy
 
'Nature is one. It is not divided into physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics.' Albert Szent-Gyorgi

'The greatest unexplored territory in the world is the space between the ears.' Bill O'Brien CEO
 
' New technology is common, new thinking is rare.' Sir Peter Blake
 
'Youth is wholly experimental.' R L Stevenson
 
'Intellectual activity anywhere is the same whether at the frontier of knowledge or in a third grade classroom.' Jerome Bruner
 
'The whole process of education should be thus conceived as the process of learning to think through the solutions of real problems.' John Dewey
 
'If you can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.' Chinese proverb
 
'there can be no mental development without interest.' A N Whitehead
 
'He aha te mea nui o te ao?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata'
'What is the most important thing in the world?
It is people, it is people , it is people.'  Maori saying

'Human beings are not machines. Human beings are complex adaptive systems living on the edge of the continuos ability to self-actualise. We are creative and in that creativity 'We can reinvent our own lives'. Maslow
 
'Our view of learning is much more like the learning of an artist or great scientist. The artist needs skills and tools....the artist armed with an idea...begins to create.. accompanied by many changes stops starts and erasers...they have a purpose that will lead somewhere that has meaning for the artist'Caine and Caine

Activity and reflection should complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent.' Csikszentmihalyi