Educational quotes 1: general philosophy

The is the first of  A series of educational quotes from Leading-Learning website which is to be discontinued. The quotes were the most visited pages on the website.

General Philosophy.


It is important that a school be 'led' by a set of agreed shared beliefs. To achieve this the staff and community need to enter into a series of 'learning conversations' to define and articulate such a philosophy. As it is said: If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything' or 'Control your own destiny or someone else will'.
 
 
'What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.' John Dewey

'The vitality of thought is an adventure.Ideas won't keep.Something must be done about them'. Alfred North Whitehead.
 
'We need a metamorphosis of education - from the cocoon a butterfly should emerge. Improvement does not give us a butterfly only a faster caterpillar.' Learning to Learn http://www.learningtolearn.sa.edu.au/
 
'No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. We need to see the world anew.' Albert Einstein
 
'Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting the different results' Albert Einstein.
 
'Some people would rather die than think'.  Bertrand Russell
 
'If we always do what we've always done, we will get what we've always got.' Adam Urbanski
 
'One can never consent to creep when one feels the compulsion to soar'. Helen Keller
 
'Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.' Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr
 
'Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each others errors….Only a sailor can set them straight'. John Ralston Saul, 'Voltaire's Bastards'.
 
'The faithful witness, like…Socrates, Voltaire, and Swift and Christ himself, is at his best when he is questioning and clarifying and avoiding the specialists obsession with solution. He betrays society when he is silent…He is true to himself and to people when his clarity causes disquiet.' John Ralston Saul 'Voltaire's Bastards'
 
'Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to.' Peter Block Business Philosopher
 
'Wordsmiths who serve established power…castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.' John Ralston Paul, 'Voltaire's Bastards.'
 
'It is today we must create the world of the future.' Eleanor Roosevelt
 
'The human mind treats a new idea the way a body treats a strange problem it rejects it.' Sir Peter Medawar
 
'Some folks are wise, some are otherwise'. Tobies George Smollett
 
To arrive at the simplest truth requires years of contemplation.' Isaac Newton
 
'Those who do nothing are never wrong.' Theodore de Bouville
 
'The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.' J P Harltley From the Go -Between
 
'We are natural mind changing entities until we are 10 or so. But as we get older…then it is very hard to change our minds'. Howard Gardner
 
'Fundamentalism is a kind of decision not to change your mind about something…Many of us are fundamentalists…because it worked pretty well for us.' Howard Gardner
 
'Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail'. Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
'The world by and large has to be reinvented.' Charles Handy in 'Beyond Certainty'.
 
'There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.' Frederico Fellini Film Director
 
'Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge'. Winston Churchill
 
'There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.' Peter Drucker Business Philosopher.
 
'Don't try to innovate for the future. Innovate for the present.' Peter Drucker
 
'I believe that revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new life forms.' M Gorbachev
 
'Chaos breeds life, where order breeds habit,' Henry Brooks US Historian
 
'Is anybody alive out there?' Bruce Springsteen to the crowd.
 
'It is impossible to soar like an eagle if you are surrounded by turkeys' Anon
 
'Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.' Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
'Complexity creates confusion, simplicity focus.' Edward de Bono
 
'To simplify you have to clarify. Simplification is the new competitive advantage' Jack Trout 'Simplicity'
 
'Our life is frittered away by detail.. simplicity simplicity, simplicity.' Henry Thoreau
 
'We need to be the authors of our own life.' Peter Senge
 
'We have banished our artists to the fringe of society and tell them to eat cake. It is our artists who choose freedom over safety and use their talents to question and confront the culture.' Peter Block, Philosopher
 
'We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming'. Verner von Braun
 
'First define, then refine'. Bill Guild NZ Pioneer teacher
 
'Everything of importance has been said by someone who didn't invent it.' Alfred North Whitehead.
 
'How has the world of the child changed in the last 150 years?' … the answer is. 'It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed….they're' immersed in all kinds of stuff that was unheard of 150years ago, and yet if you look at schools today versus 100 years ago, they are more similar than dissimilar'. Peter Senge
 
''Educating the masses was intended only to improve the relationship between the top and the bottom of society. Not for changing the nature of the relationship.' John Ralston Paul 'Voltaire's Bastards.'
 
'The conduct of schools, based upon a new order of conception, is so much more difficult than is the management of schools which walk the beaten path.' John Dewey
 
'Much educational change is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to get a better view'. Anon
 
Being on tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.' Karl 'The Great' Wallenda
 
'A pessimist is a person who looks both ways before crossing a one way road.' L Peters
 
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.' Les Brown
 
In the end we will have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically.' Vincent van Gogh
 
'It is difficult to know what a fish talk about but you can be sure it isn't about water'. Anon 
 
'We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?' Neil Postman
 
'The development of a tree depends on where it is planted.' Edward Joyner Yale Univ. School
 
'We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.' Margaret Wheatley and Kellner Rogers
 
Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.' Peter Berger Sociologist
 
'It is always the minorities who aren't part of a mainstream who define what the limits…of the majority are going to be.' Rose Elizabeth Bird, US Chief Justice, California
 
'The East contemplated the forest the West counted the trees…the mind that knows that trees and the forest is a new mind.' Marilyn Ferguson
 
Bureaucracies are beautiful mechanisms for the evasion of responsibilities and guilt.' Warren Bennis Leadership expert
 
' I know of no other safe depository of the ultimate power of society but the people themselves and if we think ( the people) not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion the remedy is not to take it from them , but to inform their discretion by education'. Thomas Jefferson 1820
 
'A little revolution now and then is a good thing.' Thomas Jefferson
 
'Slow down you are going too fast'. Simon and Garfunkle
 
'The world is crazier, and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural.' Louis MacNeice Author
 
'You may feel like a voice in the wilderness, but it is your voice we are waiting to hear…you are the determining factor.' Neale Donald Walsh Author
 
'Courage is the first of human virtues because it makes all others possible.' Aristotle
 
'Teach us to walk the soft Earth as relatives to all that live there.' Sioux Indian saying
 
'Everything important is already known, the only thing is to rediscover it.' Anon
 
'Every reform was once private opinion.' Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
'Those of us who are old can afford to live dangerously. We have less to lose.' Maggie Kuhn Grey Panthers
 
'Age is compulsory, wisdom is optional'. Anon
 
'The most potent force for change …is the growing recognition of millions of adults that there own impoverishment came from a large measure, from their schooling.'  Marilyn Fergussen Aquarian Conspiracy.
 
'Some of us are just less damaged than others.' ( by schooling) Buckminster Fuller
 
'An impressive proportion of great, original thinkers were educated at home…stimulated (and) born up by high expectations' Aquarian Conspiracy
 
'Home is the first school for us all, a school with no fixed curriculum, no quality control, no examinations, no teacher training' Charles Handy
 
'When the spirit of people is strong focused and vibrant, wonderful things happen'. Harrison Owen
 
'Present thinking people kill the future.' Ken Blanchard ,Business Consultant
 
'If you can change your mind, you can change the world.' Joey Reimer Creativity Guru
 
'When I was young I thought that people at the top really understood what the hell was happening…now I know they don't know.' David Mahoney
 
'The first people had the questions, and they were free. The second people had answers, and they became enslaved.' Wind Eagle Modern Indian Medicine Woman
 
'I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers…creativity above fact regurgitation…individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance….. And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy. Tom Peters Author 'Re-imagine' http://www.tompeters.com/
 
'We are all carriers of our own stories. We have never trusted our own voices. Reforms came, but we don't make them. They were presented by people removed from schools, by 'experts'. Such changes bi passes school. School by school changes, however slow, could make a powerful difference.' Deborah Meier, 'Good Schools are Still Possible'
 
'The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.' William Gibson
 
'Reformation comes from the bottom up - a transformation demanded by the people.' Religious writer
 
'Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind' Thomas Jefferson
 
'Life can only be understood backwards but you have to live it forward. You can only do that by stepping into uncertainty and by trying, within this uncertainty, to create your own islands of security….The new security will be a belief that …if this doesn't work out you could do something else'. You are your own security'. Charles Handy Business Philosopher.
 
'The homogenization of cultural diversity and the destruction of cultural history are central forces underlying societal breakdown worldwide'…… what is the deepest and most profound force driving change , I'd say it is the awareness, however dim and ill formed , that we are in deep trouble…The first step is to realize everything is interrelated.' Peter Senge 'Through the Eye of the Needle'
 
'The slick houses and holiday homes of the rich hiding the despair of the poor.' Anon
 
'We have been through a period when knowledge was fragmented, but dreams of coherence survived….. the expanding edges of fields…are closer to each other than are the central cores.' Carnegie Foundation/Teaching 77.
 
'We have been the benefactors of our cultural heritage and the victims of our cultural narrowness.' Stanley Kripper Psychologist
 
'What we thought was the horizon of our potential turns out to be only the foreground.' Tom Roberts Educator
 
'We will not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.' T S Eliot 'Little Gidding'
 
'The centre falls about. The centre cannot hold.' W B Yeats
 
'Chaos breeds life, while order breeds success.' Franklin P Adams
 
'Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual' Erich Fromm
 
'What is to give life must endure burning.' Victor Frankl
 
'Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.' Marilyn Ferguson
 
'The map is not the territory.' Alfred Korzybski /Semanticist
 
'We are told not to cross a bridges until we come to it, but this world is owned by men who have crossed bridges far ahead of the crowd,' Anon
 
'If I knew what was going to happen in ten years I would do it now. I just follow my nose.' Stephen Hawkins Physicist
 
'Fall in love with your life's work again, my fiend, or your energy will wane, your voice will falter and there will be nothing to prove but the fact that you are taking up valuable space.' Anon
 
'Carpenters bend wood fletchers bend arrows; wise men fashion themselves.' Buddha
 
'In the end we shall have had enough cynicism and skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live life more musically.' Vincent van Gogh
 
'Do not go where the path may lead; go where there is no path and leave a trail.' Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
'If you are looking for a big opportunity, find a big problem.' Anon
 
'Choices in life are rarely pure, but to understand the middle ground it is helpful to imagine the extremes.' Peter Berger, Sociologist
Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.' Fullan and Hargreaves

Lucy: 'Charlie Brown on the cruise ship of life which way is your deck chair facing?' Charlie Brown ponders and replies, 'I don't know, I've never been able to get one open'. Charles Schultz
'After you understand the about the sun and the stars and the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.' Alfred North Whitehead
 
'Whatever you can dream, begin to do it. Boldness has the power and magic in it.' Goethe
 
'As a child lives today he will live tomorrow' John Dewey
 
If you plan is for one year, plant rice;
If you plan is for ten years, plant trees;
If your plan is for a hundred years,
Educate children.' Confucius
 
If you know where you want to go, you have a better chance of getting there' Anon
 
Destiny is not a matter of chance it is a matter of choice.' Anon
 
' There is a road to the heart and it doesn't go through the intellect.' G K Chesterton
 
'Nothing is ever achieved without enthusiasm.' Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
Chaos breeds life while order breeds habits' Henry Adams.
 
'Where all think alike no-one thinks much.' Walter Lipman
 
'It is easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission.' Jesuit saying
 
'It takes a whole village to raise a child.' African saying
 
'Schools should be a mirror of a future society.' Anon
 
'How do we recapture the magic and myth of education? ... to enable teachers to believe in their importance...so teachers and the public can rediscovers the hope schools once held?' Deal and Peterson
 
'We make realities out of our dreams and dreams out of our realities. We are the dreamers of the dream.' Roald Dahl
 
'Education is at a turning point' Howard Gardner
 
'All great truths begin as blasphemies.' George Bernard Shaw
 
'If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.' Ludwig Wittgenstein