2,279 Quotes About Teaching

As Lenin put it, "Through the schools we will transform the old world... the final victory will belong to the schools... the final sketch plan of the socialist society will belong to the schools." So the Frankfurt School targeted and took control of the teachers' colleges in order to control what was being taught to children....young teachers are forced to go through possibly the most rigorous courses of indoctrination available in any universities.

I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession.

Even we set aside the nearly 50 percent of all beginner teachers who choose to leave the profession within five years—and ignore the evidence that those who leave are worse performers than those who stay—it is unclear whether teachers are formally terminated for poor performance any less frequently than are other workers.

The greater the number of fish a river bears the greater the number of fishermen that patronize it.

The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I’ve had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.

Though I’ve never met a teacher who was not happy in retirement, I rarely meet one who thinks that their teaching life was not a grand way to spend a human life. The unhappy ones are the young ones, those who must teach in public schools when the whole nation seems at war with the very essence of teaching.

Teaching remains a heroic act to me, and teachers live a necessary and all-important life. We are killing their spirit with unnecessary pressure and expectation that seem forced and destructive to me. Long ago I was one of them. I still regret I was forced to leave them. My entire body of work is because of men and women like them.

I consider the two years in Beaufort when I taught high school as perhaps the happiest time of my life. My attraction to melodrama and suffering had not yet overwhelmed me, but signs of it were surfacing. No one had warned me that a teacher could fall so completely in love with his students that graduation seemed like the death of a small civilization.

Teaching is the most powerful force that changes our world one student at a time.