Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety per cent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight per cent, is just to help the students get interested. Or what it usually amounts to is to not prevent them from being interested. Typically they come in interested, and the process of education is a way of driving that defect out of their minds. But if children[’s] ... normal interest is maintained or even aroused, they can do all kinds of things in ways we don’t understand. Noam Chomsky
One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me is that He sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. Lady Jane Grey, 1537-54
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman vol 9: The Kindly Ones
My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can’t decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman. Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth. William Glasser
The good teacher discovers the natural gifts of his pupils and liberates them by the stimulating influence of the inspiration that he can impart. The true leader makes his followers twice the men they were before. Stephen Neill
The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power. Alfred Adler
It is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Samuel Johnson
David Henry – a PE teacher at Fairwood Elementary School in Kent, Washington – landed in hot water when parents of five-and six-year-old students said it wasn’t ‘his business ... to put away their visions of sugar plums and view the world with Scrooge-like realism’. News article Truth Hurts: Gym Teacher Gives Lowdown on Santa, reprinted The Phoenix Gazette 1st January 1994
I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker. Stanley Kubrick
Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, December 1769
Gandhi’s Jesus was the original charismatic teacher. Dr Robert Beckford, The Hidden Story of Jesus, Channel 4 2007
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. C S Lewis, Mere Christianity
He taught me in this room, he taught me keep your friends close but your enemies closer. The Godfather II 1974 starring Robert De Niro & Al Pacino & Robert Duvall & Diane Keaton & Talia Shire & Morgana King & John Cazale & Marianna Hill & Lee Strasberg et al, director Francis Ford Coppola, Michael
Leon, I want you to teach me how to be like you. Leon: The Professional 1994 starring Jean Reno & Gary Oldman & Natalie Portman & Danny Aiello & Michael Badalucco & Ellen Greene & Willi One Blood & Don Creech & Adam Busch et al, director Luc Besson, Mathilda
Why would a teacher cheat for a kid on a test? ... Lots and lots of teachers were cheating. Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, Freakonomics, Sky Atlantic, caption; viz also novel
It is easier for a tutor to command than to teach. John Locke
In Japan some people think it is better not to teach certain things than to teach everything. And some of the atrocities, some of the invasions, that Japanese Imperial Armies committed during the War are not fully conveyed to the younger generation. Yoshito Sakurai
You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil. Friedrich Nietzsche
The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context – which means evolution, when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied. Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth p4
The issues goes wider than what is currently taught in one college. There is a growing anxiety about what will be taught and how it will be taught in the new generation of proposed faith schools. ibid. p5 letter co-written with Bishop Harries et al to Tony Blair
Maudlin Street. Carry on Teacher 1962 starring Kenneth Connor & Charles Hawtrey & Leslie Phillips & Joan Sims & Kenneth Williams & Hattie Jacques & Rosalind Knight & Cyril Chamberlain & Ted Ray & Roy Hines & Carol White & George Gowell & Richard O'Sullivan et al, director Gerald Thomas, sign on gate opening scene
Free expression – you know what that means – sex in the bicycle sheds. ibid. Hawtrey
Phillips: Who’s that?
Acting Headmaster: Miss Alcock. ibid.
Al Murray on stage: What do you teach, mate?
Maths Teacher: Kids. Al Murray: The Only Way is Epic, Comedy Extra 2016
Teachers? We’ve been promised one of them for next term. Spitting Image s10e4, headmaster to Queen’s opening of new book, ITV 1991
These are troubling times for teachers in America. With schools gripped by the fear of mass shootings, these drills have become commonplace. Teachers and school staff are even taught life-saving skills. Since the last mass shooting there have been calls for a more radical approach. Teachers Training to Kill, Channel 4 2019
Mary Kay Letourneau did the unthinkable when she had sex and a baby with a 13-year-old sixth grade student. He was her student in the sixth grade. When the boy was 13 the relationship turned sexual. Mary Kay Letourneau: Autobiography, CI 2019
1997: Mary Kay Letourneau, a gifted 35-year-old Seattle teacher, married mother of four, plead guilty to two counts of child rape. ibid.
‘20+ years and little has changed: she still loves Billy and feels that this is the guy she wants to be with.’ ibid. commentator
‘Awful appalling men doing horrible things.’ Panorama: The Teacher the Abuser: Fighting for Justice, Nicky Campbell, BBC 2023