During a conversation with teachers in early childhood, middle school, and high school classrooms, a theme emerged regarding[...]
Welcome to the Scholar-Practitioner Nexus
All educators committed to developing their capacity as scholar-practitioners are invited into this space of support and learning.
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"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."— John Dewey
"When you know better you do better."— Maya Angelou
“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.”— Marian Wright Edelman
"It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning."— Claude Bernard
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."— Albert Einstein
"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."— Marilyn vos Savant
"Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow."— Anthony J. D'Angelo
"All new learning looks at first like chaos."— Adrienne Rich
"Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live."— Adrienne Rich
"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."— Herbert Spencer
"Education is a human right with immense power to transform. On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development."— Kofi Annan
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."— Aristotle
"Mistakes—call them unexpected learning experiences."— Richard Bach
"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."— Helen Keller
"The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see."— Adrienne Rich
"The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you."— B. B. King
"The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change."— Carl Rogers
"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."— Jacob Bronowski
"I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something—a great deal—to do with how we live our lives."— Adrienne Rich
"A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new."— Albert Einstein
"The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated."— James Baldwin
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."— James A. Baldwin
"A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own."— Maxine Greene
"You teach best what you most need to learn."— Richard Bach
"Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions—it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short."— Adrienne Rich
"The whole world opened to me when I learned to read."— Mary McLeod Bethune
"Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?"— Cesar Chavez
"I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught."— Winston Churchill
"We are all in the process of becoming."— Audre Lorde
"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."— Aldous Huxley
"Schooling is what happens inside the wall of the school, some of which is educational. Education happens everywhere, and it happens from the moment a child is born—some say before—until it dies."— Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
"The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative."— John Dewey
"The focus of tolerance education is to deal with the concept of equality and fairness. We need to establish confidence with children that there is more goodness than horror in this world."— Morris Dees
"One of the things that we must do as teachers is twirl around and around, and find out what works with the situation that we're in. Our models might not work. And that twirling, changing, is part of the empowerment."— bell hooks
Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life.— W. E. B. Du Bois
"…the fact that students can be touched and inspired as well as trained and informed has always been the true teacher’s aim and joy."— Andrew Delbanco
"Real education enhances the dignity of a human being and increases his or her self-respect. If only the real sense of education could be realized by each individual and carried forward in every field of human activity, the world will be so much a better place to live in."— A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."— Albert Einstein
"I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."— Albert Einstein
"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."— R. Buckminster Fuller
"Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information."— Paulo Freire
"Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants."— John W. Gardner
"Part of teaching is helping people create themselves."— Maxine Greene
"Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school."— Bill Gates
"I've come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It's my personal approach that creates the climate. It's my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a student's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a student humanized or de-humanized."— Haim Ginott
"As the humanities and liberal arts are downsized, privatized, and commodified, higher education finds itself caught in the paradox of claiming to invest in the future of young people while offering them few intellectual, civic, and moral supports."— Henry Giroux
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."— Albert Einstein
"What we cannot imagine cannot come into being."— bell hooks
"Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious."— Maxine Greene
"A college should not be a haven from worldly contention, but a place where young people fight out among and within themselves contending ideals of the meaningful life, and where they discover that self-interest need not be at odds with concern for one another. We owe it to posterity to preserve and protect this institution. Democracy depends on it."— Andrew Delbanco
"I think there’s a conceit, a myth, that you can go and sit in a university and things will come to you. They don’t. You have to go to them."— Condoleezza Rice
"Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results."— John Dewey
"To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted."— Maxine Greene
"True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own."— Nikos Kazantzakis
"The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education."— Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance."— Jonathan Kozol
"There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning."— Jiddu Krishnamurti
"I have always had this view about the modern education system: we pay attention to brain development, but the development of warmheartedness we take for granted."— Dalai Lama
"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward."— Vern Law
"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."— Abraham Lincoln
"I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework."— Lily Tomlin
"It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties."— Alice Duer Miller
"I do not teach. I relate."— Michel de Montaigne
"The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time."— Jiddu Krishnamurti
"We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being."— Maria Montessori
"Only grown-ups think that the things children say come out of nowhere. We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves."— bell hooks
"The right to a quality education is, I believe, the perfect path to bridge the gap between different cultures and to reconcile various civilizations. Without such a right, the values of liberty, justice and equality will have no meaning. Ignorance is by far the biggest danger and threat to humankind."— Moza bint Nasser
"The intellectual tradition of the West is very individualistic. It's not community-based. The intellectual is often thought of as a person who is alone and cut off from the world. So I have had to practice being willing to leave the space of my study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community."— bell hooks
"I don't know why people have divided the whole world into two groups, west and east. Education is neither eastern nor western. Education is education and it's the right of every human being."— Malala Yousafzai
"The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done."— Jean Piaget
"Education is indoctrination if you're white—subjugation if you're black."— James Baldwin
"I would even say that my parents, and their friends in our community, thought of education as a kind of armor against racism."— Condoleezza Rice
"[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone."— bell hooks
"When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."— Audre Lorde
"The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education."— Ken Robinson
"The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history."— Carl T. Rowan
"You can't have a university without having free speech, even though at times it makes us terribly uncomfortable. If students are not going to hear controversial ideas on college campuses, they're not going to hear them in America. I believe it's part of their education."— Donna Shalala
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."— George Bernard Shaw
"I am forever on the way"— Maxine Greene
"…novelty for the beginner comes in one form, and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is nuance."— Paul Silva
"More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities."— Jonathan Kozol
"Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society."— Sonia Sotomayor
When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it—this is knowledge.
— Confucius.
"The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence."— Rabindranath Tagore
"Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality."— Adrienne Rich
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."— Alvin Toffler
...pedagogy can be generally described as distinguishing what is good or right from what is bad or wrong...in our ways of acting and interacting with children.— Max van Manen
"Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy."— Neil deGrasse Tyson
"Arts education is a big part of building a 21st century creative mind, and I think that we have let way too many kids lose their way by not drawing in their young minds with music, dance, painting and the other various ways we can express those things we do not have words for."— Heather Watts
"Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn't measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student."— Randi Weingarten
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."— Albert Einstein
"The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom."— bell hooks
"Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not."— Ken Robinson
"Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living."— John Dewey
"What is crucial is the provision of opportunities for telling all the diverse stories, for interpreting membership as well as ethnicity, for making inescapable the braids of experience woven into the fabric of America's plurality."— Maxine Greene
"An important verity about knowledge is that the brain works most effectively with consciously retained information. We more easily remember what we want to recall later. When we feed our fourteen billion brain cells with information that will enrich us and help others, we are really learning to Think Big."— Benjamin Carson
"What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe."— bell hooks
A distinguishing feature of a human science approach to pedagogy is how the notions of theory and research are to be related to the practice of living. In contrast to the more positivistic and behavioral empirical sciences, human science does not see theory as something tha stands before practice in order to "inform" it. Rather theory enlightens practice. Practice (or life) always comes first and theory comes later as a rsult of reflection. — Max van Manen
"I believe in the unanswerable questions, the really hard ones."— Maxine Greene
Everybody is a Genius. But If You Judge a Fish by Its Ability to Climb a Tree, It Will Live Its Whole Life Believing that It is Stupid— Albert Einstein
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. — Confucius
I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.— Albert Einstein
You resolve complications and resistance in one of two ways: changing the world or changing yourself.— Eric Nuzum
The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about yet refuse to investigate.
— Dr. Dwayne Dyer
Please get the Behavior/Clip/Stop Light Charts off the wall! My behavior is not a decoration for your classroom.
— Brian Mendler