Quotes & Sayings About Teaching Pupils

How much longer are you going to be a pupil? From now on do some teaching as well. — Seneca The Younger

Select such subjects that your pupils cannot walk out without seeing them. Train your pupils to be observers, and have them provided with the specimens about which you speak. If you can find nothing better, take a house-fly or a cricket, and let each one hold a specimen and examine it as you talk. — Louis Agassiz

In brief, the teaching process, as commonly observed, has nothing to do with the investigation and establishment of facts, assuming that actual facts may ever be determined. Its sole purpose is to cram the pupils, as rapidly and as painlessly as possible, with the largest conceivable outfit of current axioms, in all departments of human thought - to make the pupil a good citizen, which is to say, a citizen differing as little as possible, in positive knowledge and habits of mind, from all other citizens. In other words, it is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but this is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers. — H.L. Mencken

Tutors should behave reverently before their pupils. — Roger L'Estrange

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils. — Will Durant

It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching. — Douglas Hurd

Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul.It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over pupils: he often beats them and insensibly he loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings.He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company; and in a surprising short time alas this brands him with the mark of Cain. Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? — Patrick O'Brian

Aside from the straightforwardly visible curriculum, there is the hidden curriculum. This exists in the wider set of beliefs and values pupils acquire because of the way that a school is run and its teaching organized. It is about the behaviour of the teachers, the textbooks chosen, the school rules. — Gary Thomas

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets. — Annie Dillard

And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out. — Philip K. Dick

The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure. — William James

Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion? — Ayn Rand

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation. — Stephen Neill

Wherever there are beginners and experts, old and young, there is some kind of learning going on, some kind of teaching. We are all pupils and we are all teachers. — Gilbert Highet

You are rewarding a teacher poorly if you remain always a pupil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Personally I would like to have pupils, a studio, pass on my love to them, work with them, without teaching them anything ... A convent, a monastery, a phalanstery of painting where one could train together ... but no programme, no instruction in painting ... drawing is still alright, it doesn't count, but painting - the way to learn is to look at the masters, above all at nature, and to watch other people painting.. — Paul Cezanne

I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. He will then cease from half-hearted attempts to worry his pupils with memorizing a lot of irrelevant stuff of inferior importance. — Alfred North Whitehead

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. — Amos Bronson Alcott

He found, moreover, that the younger and more ignorant his pupils were, the more pleasure he took in teaching. — Hermann Hesse

I'd stand at the front of the classroom, teaching my primary-school charges basic facts about language, life, the world, and I'd find that at the same time I was teaching myself these basic facts all over again - filtered through the eyes and minds of these children. Done the right way, this was a refreshing experience. Profound, even. I got along well with my pupils, their mothers, and my fellow teachers. Still — Haruki Murakami

It would be a great advantage to some schoolmasters if they would steal two hours a day from their pupils and give their own minds the benefit of the robbery. — John Frederick Boyes

As with most voluntary school integration programs, dispersal of the black children was the norm. In Portland, no more than forty-five black children were bused to any single elementary school, and white schools of four-hundred to five-hundred pupils received as few as four and in most instances only ten to fifteen black students. Brush Elementary, the all-white school Rist selected for daily observation, received about thirty black children.
The principal, along with most of his all-white teaching staff, had never taught a black child. He hired a black school aide because he felt that most of the white students had never spoken to a black person. His lack of racial sensitivity was illustrated in a staff discussion about the collection of milk money, when he said, "I guess we had better not call it chocolate milk any longer. It would probably now be more appropriate to refer to it as black milk. — Derrick A. Bell

To have a group of cloistered clinicians away completely from the broad current of professional life would be bad for teacher and worse for student. The primary work of a professor of medicine in a medical school is in the wards, teaching his pupils how to deal with patients and their diseases. — William Osler

The reason for teaching history is not that it changes society, but that it changes pupils; it changes what they see in the world, and how they see it ... To say someone has learnt history is to say something very wide ranging about the way in which he or she is likely to make sense of the world. History offers a way of seeing almost any substantive issue in human affairs, subject to certain procedures and standards, whatever feelings one may have. — Peter Lee

I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn. — Albert Einstein

You never speak about yourself without loss. Your self-condemnation is always accredited, your self-praise discredited. There may be some people of my temperament, I who learn better by contrast than by example, and by flight than by pursuit. This was the sort of teaching that Cato the Elder had in view when he said that the wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise; and also that ancient lyre player who, Pausanias tells us, was accustomed to force his pupils to go hear a bad musician who lived across the way, where they might learn to hate his discords and false measures. — Michel De Montaigne

A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them. — Tom Stoppard

Pupils may learn many things when a teacher is not in fact teaching. — Paul Q. Hirst

Of course there are teachers who can teach a subject, in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren't many who can adjust their teaching to the abilities and tendencies of their pupils and explain things in their own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all. — Haruki Murakami

Perhaps teachers must be good actors where lessons are concerned, but in life outside the class, we mustn't hide from our pupils our individual spirits. — Larisa Kuznetsova

The process of learning to be holy, like the process of learning to pray, may properly be thought of as a school - God's own school, in which the curriculum, the teaching staff, the rules, the discipline, the occasional prizes and the fellow pupils with whom one studies, plays, debates and fraternizes, are all there under God's sovereign providence. — J.I. Packer

I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade. — Jasper Fforde

As long as a man knows very well the strength and weaknesses of his teaching, his art, his religion, its power is still slight. The pupil and apostle who, blinded by the authority of the master and by the piety he feels toward him, pays no attention to the weaknesses of a teaching, a religion, and soon usually has for that reason more power than the master. The influence of a man has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a perception to achieve victory often means merely to unite it with stupidity so intimately that the weight of the latter also enforces the victory of the former. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It makes little sense to spend a month teaching decimal fractions to fourth-grade pupils when they can be taught in a week, and better understood and retained, by sixth-grade students. Child-centeredness does not mean lack of rigor or standards; it does mean finding the best match between curricula and children's developing interests and abilities. — David Elkind

Seven Rules Formulated for Teaching Arithmetic:
1) Consider the situation the pupils faces.
2) Consider the response you wish to connect with.
3) Form the bond; do not expect it to come by miracle.
4) Other things being equal, form no bond that will have to be broken.
5) Other things being equal, do not form two or three bonds when one will serve.
6) Other things being equal, form bonds in the way that they are required later to act.
7) Favor, therefore, the situations which life itself will offer, and the responses which life itself will demand. (p. 101) — Edward Lee Thorndike

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools, in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only, has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator himself, they stop short, and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of his existence. They labour with studied ingenuity to ascribe every thing they behold to innate properties of matter, and jump over all the rest by saying, that matter is eternal. — Thomas Paine

I have a true aversion to teaching. The perennial business of a professor of mathematics is only to teach the ABC of his science; most of the few pupils who go a step further, and usually to keep the metaphor, remain in the process of gathering information, become only Halbwisser [one who has superficial knowledge of the subject], for the rarer talents do not want to have themselves educated by lecture courses, but train themselves. And with this thankless work the professor loses his precious time. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

I think it likely that some of my pupils will reach unusual distinction. — Howard Pyle

The commonest error of the gifted scholar, inexperienced in teaching, is to expect pupils to know what they have been told. But telling is not teaching. The expression of facts that are in one's mind is a natural impulse when one wishes others to know these facts, just as to cuddle and pat a sick child is a natural impulse. But telling a fact to a child may not cure his ignorance of it any more than patting him will cure his scarlet fever. (p. 61) — Edward Lee Thorndike

One thing I more and this is all I have to say...High School is not a separate unit from you. We are apart of you. Every man, woman, and child in this community is a part...Your ways of life in your homes and your town reflect here in the school. You can help us or you can hurt us. Our success depends largely on you. I used to think when I first started teaching school that it was all up to the teachers and the pupils. I have changed my mind. The little island of humanity that is each one of you must unite with other islands and become a mainland if we are to have a successful school. — Jesse Stuart

Is not the great defect of our education today - a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned - that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Teaching can be compared to selling commodities. No one can sell unless someone buys ... yet there are teachers who think they have done a good day's teaching irrespective of what the pupils have learned. — John Dewey

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

My objective in teaching my pupils is that they should be fitted for any kind of art. — Howard Pyle