If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.
When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control.
Running a school where the students all succeed, even if some students have to help others to make the grade, is good preparation for democracy.
We may be up against a stone wall, but we don’t have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to.
The answer lies in preventing failures not in looking for better ways to fix the children who are failing.
Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.
We don’t focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.
If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.
I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.
The Compassionate Classroom is a fabulous book! If teachers will read it, they can transform their classrooms.
A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, shot a hole in one playing by himself. Disaster.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it’s really bad because everything we’ve done is de-humanizing education. It’s destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.
As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.
There is plenty of competition in a Glasser Quality School in that there is winning but no losing.
To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it.
I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.
Told that the passing grade is a B or competence and that we will help you to get there, students do competent work. The lowest passing grade in the real world is competence. Why do schools accept so much less?
In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.
It is no kindness to treat unhappy people as helpless, hopeless, or inadequate, no matter what has happened to them. Kindness is having faith in the truth and that people can handle it and use it for their benefit. True compassion is helping people help themselves.