Quotes & Sayings About Pedagogy

A significant contribution to science pedagogy and to the scholarship of teaching and learning ... [W]ill be of interest to researchers in the area of science education and to college and university faculty members who seek to improve their teaching. — David W. Oxtoby

private school teachers tend to have fewer credentials and to cling to traditional teaching styles, such as lecturing while students sit in rows and take notes. Public school teachers, by contrast, are much more likely to be certified, to hold higher degrees, and to embrace research-based innovations in curriculum and pedagogy — David C. Berliner

The school must permit the free, natural manifestations of the child if in the school scientific pedagogy is to be born. This is the essential reform. No one may affirm that such a — Maria Montessori

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease. — George Steiner

There are many who occasionally attend church and who are trying experimentally to be Christians, yet are unable to identify well or define accurately the central truths of Christian teaching. The knowledge they have of the Christian tradition may have come chiefly through hymns. Their strong and sincere feelings are not matched with serious biblical or historical reflection on those feelings. Religious feelings are, indeed, crucial to the deeper learning of Christian truth, but they easily become superficial and narcissistic if the mind of Christ is not a mentor to natural religious impulse. The loss of center in Christian education is arguably due to a serious default of pastoral leadership; when the teaching elder does not teach, the effect is felt throughout the entire Christian congregation. — Thomas C. Oden

In a sense, all of my books have been about a 'poisonous pedagogy,' which engenders a culture of obedience, this underlying theme of patriarchal systems. — John Bradshaw

Grandma calls it the Socratic Method. She considers it the highest pedagogical technique. I call it cornering a person. Instead of just telling you what I want you to know, I ambush you with questions. You try to escape, but you can't. You can run whichever way you like, but in the end you'll fall right into my trap. — Sophia Nikolaidou

Formal learning is like riding a bus: the driver decides where the bus is going; the passengers are along for the ride. Informal learning is like riding a bike: the rider chooses the destination, the speed, and the route. — Jay Cross

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

I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too. — Andrea Dworkin

Pedagogy and Equality are always trumped by Maternity. — Jessica Brockmole

The confessor can nullify the exquisitely seasonable moment of confession by talking instead of listening. When he sees pedagogy and advice as more important than simple listening, he diverts the stream of confession. — Thomas C. Oden

Repetition is the mother of pedagogy — Dennis Prager

It is part of our pedagogy to teach the operations of thinking, feeling, and willing so that they may be made conscious. For if we do not know the difference between an emotion and a thought, we will know very little ... We need to understand the components (of emotions) at work ... in order to free their hold. — Mary Caroline Richards

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. — Jonathan Kozol

Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy. — Anne Sullivan

The technology itself is not transformative. It's the school, the pedagogy, that is transformative. — Tanya Byron

The world as it was, is, or will be, is beyond common sense, beyond natural understanding: it must be taught. — Masood Ashraf Raja

Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions. Thus it is pleasant to remember Cleveland, and to speak of him from time to time. He was the last of the Romans. If pedagogy were anything save the puerile racket that it is he would loom large in the schoolbooks. As it is, he is subordinated to Lincoln, Roosevelt I and Wilson. This is one of the things that are the matter with the United States. — H.L. Mencken

This, then, is the dread that seems to lie beneath the fear of equalizing. Equity is seen as dispossession. Local autonomy is seen as liberty
even if the poverty of those in nearby cities robs them o fall meaningful autonomy by narrowing their choices to the meanest and the shabbiest of options. In this way, defendants in these cases seem to polarize two of the principles that lie close to the origins of this republic. Liberty and equity are seen as antibodies to each other. — Jonathan Kozol

Now, it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about. — J.K. Rowling

Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development — Lev S. Vygotsky

For a man is not only a biological but a social product, and the social environment of individuals in the process of education, is the home. Scientific pedagogy will seek in vain to better the new generation if it does not succeed in influencing also the environment within which this new generation grows! I — Maria Montessori

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. — Alison Gopnik

Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair. — Jonathan Kozol

Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive — Bell Hooks

A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools. — William Z. Foster

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur. — Janet Flanner

Pedagogy, like language itself, can either liberate or imprison ideas, inspire of suffocate constructive thinking. — Hyman Bass

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. — Paulo Freire

critical pedagogy becomes a project that stresses the need for teachers and students to actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it. — Henry A. Giroux

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding. — Sugata Mitra

Pedagogy is not about training, it is about critically educating people to be self reflective, capable of critically address their relationship with others and with the larger world. Pedagogy in this sense provides not only important critical and intellectual competencies; it also enables people to intervene critically in the world. — Henry Giroux

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture. — Michael Gove

He had, in fact, already begun to sink into that creeping dry rot of pedagogy which is the worst and ultimate pitfall of the profession; giving the same lessons year after year had formed a groove into which the other affairs of his life adjusted themselves with insidious ease. He worked well; he was conscientious; he was a fixture that gave service, satisfaction, confidence, everything except inspiration. — James Hilton

The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors. — Paulo Freire

school people must not fall into the trap of thinking that early preparation for an unjust world requires early exposure to injustice — Oakes Jeannie

The art of handling university students is to make oneself appear, and this almost ostentatiously, to be treating them as adults ... — Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is. — Bell Hooks

In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue, and thought to have real effects, they must advocate the message that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. — Henry Giroux

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it- this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. — H.L. Mencken

There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If they learn how much less they are getting than rich children, we are told, this knowledge may induce them to regard themselves as "victims," and such "victim-thinking," it is argued, may then undermine their capacity to profit from whatever opportunities may actually exist. But this is a matter of psychology-or strategy-and not reality. The matter, in any case, is academic since most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts. They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. It is a waste of time to worry whether we should tell them something they could tell to us. About injustice, most poor children in American cannot be fooled. — Jonathan Kozol

Teachers who are accountable to principals who are, in turn, accountable to school communities are likely to be more professionally 'grounded' and less susceptible to avant garde fashions in curriculum and pedagogy. School — Tony Abbott

This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. — Paulo Freire

A bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum. Or more precisely, pedagogy is curriculum, because what matters is how things are taught, rather than what is taught. — Dylan Wiliam

The 'polymath' had already died out by the close of the eighteenth century, and in the following century intensive education replaced extensive, so that by the end of it the specialist had evolved. The consequence is that today everyone is a mere technician, even the artist ... — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is precisely because I believe it is not possible to neatly separate the sexual from other sorts of relations that I find the movement to bar the sexual from pedagogy not only dangerous but supremely impractical. — Jane Gallop

The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement ... We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize education in America. — Pat Robertson

It is not suprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. — Paulo Freire

With the rise of new technologies, media, and other cultural apparatuses as powerful forms of public pedagogy, students need to understand and address how these pedagogical cultural apparatuses work to diffuse learning from any vestige of critical thought. This is a form of public pedagogy that needs to be addressed both for how it deforms and for how it can create important new spaces for emancipatory forms of pedagogy. — Henry Giroux

The diffusion of a universalist culture and of a pedagogy of peace appears more than ever to be the path that we must follow for the salvation of all nations on earth. — Carlo Azeglio Ciampi

It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open-ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects in one day, rather than sticking to one subject for more than a day. These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon. — Matt Ridley

But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task. — William James

Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a 'child-centered' rather than a 'teacher-directed' approach to classroom instruction. Freire's rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools' most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a 'guide on the side,' not a 'sage on the stage.' — Sol Stern

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age. — Ivan Illich

Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg - that's equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea - and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy. — Bill Bryson

I am vertiginously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell. — Joseph O'Neill

When teachers participate in a literary experience with a professionally presented children's play, they are offering their students a text quite different from anything that they will experience within their classrooms. Within this literary experience, teachers join as equals with their students, and each, as audience members within the darkened space of the performance, create their own poems to hold within themselves or share with others. — James Hugh Comey

Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through and immeasurable degree of suffering. — Melanie Klein

Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term. — Steven Pinker

Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as "sinkhole" when opposing funding for Chicago's children. "We can't keep throwing money," said Governor Thompson in 1988, "into a black hole." The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago's children. "But race," says the Tribune, "never is far from the surface ... — Jonathan Kozol

What may be learned from the rebuttals made by the defendants in New Jersey and from the protests that were sparked by the decision of the court? Much of the resistance, it appears, derives from a conservative anxiety that equity equates to "leveling." The fear that comes across in many of the letters and the editorials in the New Jersey press is that democratizing opportunity will undermine diversity and even elegance in our society and that the best schools will be dragged down to a sullen norm, a mediocre middle ground of uniformity. References to Eastern European socialism keep appearing in these letters. — Jonathan Kozol

critical pedagogy illuminates how classroom learning embodies selective values, is entangled with relations of power, entails judgments about what knowledge counts, legitimates specific social relations, defines agency in particular ways, and always presupposes a particular notion of the future. — Henry A. Giroux

Our ways of seeing are democratic. Unfortunately, they are not bureaucratic. Except in rare circumstances, I no longer believe that it is possible to be both, because when it becomes bureaucratic the struggle is not about pedagogy, it's about power. About who controls the activities that occur in schools. About who controls who participates in American society. About who controls the power base of the twenty-first century. — Denny Taylor

A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the The Wall! — Che Guevara

Education is suffering from narration sickness. — Paulo Freire

I am vertigiously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything wpold go to hell. — Joseph O'Neill

I think feminist pedagogy should not simply expose students to a particularized academic scholarship but that it should also envision the possibility of activism and struggle outside the academy. — Chandra Talpade Mohanty

The old ways of teaching are slow and expensive. But with mobile, cost plummets, access broadens, and pedagogy rises. — Michael J. Saylor

To create a community where faith matters not just in theory but in reality, faith has to be a public value, not just a private one. — Donna Freitas

So far as musical pedagogy is concerned -
And by extension of musical creation -
Nadia Boulanger is the most influential person who ever lived — Ned Rorem

How can the oppressed, as divided, unauthentic beings, participate in developing the pedagogy of their liberation? — Paulo Freire

The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise. — William Deresiewicz

It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response. — Bell Hooks

I'm not a fan of technology . I'm a fan of pedagogy, of understanding how people learn and the most effective learning methods. But technology enables some exciting changes. — Donald A. Norman

This passion, so unordered and yet so potent, explains the capacity for teaching that one frequently observes in scientific men of high attainments in their specialties-for example, Huxley, Ostwald, Karl Ludwig, Virchow, Billroth, Jowett, William G. Sumner, Halsted and Osler-men who knew nothing whatever about the so-called science of pedagogy, and would have derided its alleged principles if they had heard them stated. — H.L. Mencken

To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself. — Jacques Ranciere

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. — Steven Pinker

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think. — Mary Wollstonecraft

I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy: I settle accounts , however I can, on a certain number of problems; with you and with me or me, and through you, me and me, with a certain number of authorities represented here. I understand that the place I am now occupying will not be left out of the exhibit or withdrawn form the scene. Nor do I intend to withhold even that which I shall call, to save time, an autobiographical demonstration, although I must ask you to shift its sense a little and to listen to it with another ear. I wish to take a certain pleasure in this, so that you may learn this pleasure from me. — Jacques Derrida

Health education emphasizing risks is a form of pedagogy, which, like other forms, serves to legitimize ideologies and social practices. Risk discourse in the public health sphere allows the state, as the owner of knowledge, to exert power of the bodies of its citizens. Risk discourse, therefore, especially when it emphasizes lifestyle risks, serves as an effective Foucauldian agent of surveillance and control that is difficult to challenge because of its manifest benevolent goal of maintaining standards of health. In doing so, it draws attention away from the structural causes of ill-health. — Deborah Lupton

In looking at our our individual classroom pedagogies and our isolated artistic endeavors, we must broaden the frame of analysis to consider historical, contextual and institutional assumptions. This means a constant awareness of how the micro-practices of interpersonal dialogue and embodied ways of knowing each other can provide an impetus fro structural change. — Ann Elizabeth Armstrong

Today small boys and young men are daily inundated with a poisonous pedagogy that supports male violence and male domination, that teaches boys that unchecked violence is acceptable, that teaches them to disrespect and hate women. — Bell Hooks

Do SMART Boards and iPads really change pedagogy for the millions of students institutionally ostracized based on their race, religion, or gender? Or are they merely Band-Aids that can be used to say, "Oh look, we did something and we never had to get our hands dirty to make it happen"? — Jose Vilson

I pay my teachers very well, because pedagogy is the most important of all the sciences, — Boris Akunin

No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54). — Paulo Freire

I was more than an elementary teacher, for I was present, or directly taught the children, from eight in the morning to seven in the evening without interruption. These two years of practice are my first and indeed my true degree in pedagogy. From the very beginning of my — Maria Montessori

I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I'm not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep. — Maggie Nelson

We need to take on the new media, and in terms of power and public pedagogy, we need to organize a whole range of people outside of the academy. — Henry Giroux

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. — Freeman Dyson

...we are partisan in favor of our own children and grandchildren, who we hope can live in a world that doesn't poison them when they drink the water, breathe the air, or make a living. — Bill Bigelow

Cop a squat, animals and folks. I don't want to be here any more than the rest of you so make it fast and get out of my hair. Let's quickly run down the bullshit pedagogy. Hear ye ... Who the hell wrote this crap? ... Welcome to the Omegrion Chamber. Here we gather, one rep from each branch of the two patrias. We come in peace (he paused to snort derisively) to make peace. I'm your mediator, Savitar, and if you don't know that by now, you need to be hit in the head with a jackhammer and replaced because you're too stupid to represent your patria. But in case you're dense and forgot, I am the summation of all that was and what will one day be again. I make order from chaos and chaos from order, which is how I got drafted into this shit. Now let's get on with this before I start splitting your hairs. (Savitar) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

of oppressive state power. Gramsci's theory of hegemony as a form of cultural pedagogy is also invaluable as an element of critical educational thought. By emphasizing the pedagogical force of culture, Gramsci expands the sphere of the political by pointing to those diverse spaces and spheres in which cultural practices are deployed, lived, and mobilized in the service of knowledge, power and authority. For Gramsci, learning and politics were inextricably related and took place not merely in schools but in a vast array of public sites. — Henry A. Giroux

Knowledge (curriculum) and behavior (pedagogy) are embedded in everyone's core beliefs about the nature of God, humanity, and the world. — Abraham Kuyper

Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future. — Seymour Papert

Sometimes, when I'm teaching, when I interject a comment without anyone calling on me, without caring that I just spoke a moment before, or when I interrupt someone to redirect the conversation away from an eddy I personally find fruitless, I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I'm not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep. It's — Maggie Nelson

Education is a natural community function and occurs inevitably, since the young grow up on
the old, towards their activities, and into (or against) their institutions; and the old foster, teach,
train, exploit and abuse the young. Even neglect of the young, except physical neglect, has an
educational effect -- not the worst possible. — Paul Goodman

Efficiency and economy simply do not make good pedagogy. — Paul Lockhart

Who's in Charge Here? When a congregation is profoundly clergy-centered - when the pedagogy consists of a clergyperson (performer) downloading information and inspiration to parishioners (audience) - the game is rigged. The theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on an authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion to flower, no matter how benign the leader is. — Parker J. Palmer

What could be the utopia for the present age?
To begin with, I would want all of human order to make a partnership, beginning in schools. It is atrocious that the children leave the partnership and go to be educated by a professor, just a man or a woman. This negates partnership. Classes should be taught by couples of both sexes, and children should be educated by a man and a woman ...
... not necessarily a husband and wife. This is what I would do as a first political measure to improve social life: all human activities would have to be carried out in complimentary pairs. — Alejandro Jodorowsky