EDUCERE – TO LEAD OUT…
There are few things about which I am passionately certain, but one is that my experience of school saved me from a sort of oblivion. I have written elsewhere about my childhood school phobia & my parents’ decision to take me out of mainstream schooling for an education at a couple of small independent progressive schools. In that account I describe how, as a result of the provision of ‘freedoms from & freedoms to’, a very vulnerable mind & soul were given that most rare of opportunities, the time & the space within which to develop at child-speed.
Everything of importance & value that has come my way since has had upon it the imprint of those 10 years. My love for music, my joy in language, my striving towards good fellowship alongside personal autonomy, my hatred of institutional cant & hypocrisy, my conviction that self-determination is the prime personal goal. And, although rather than responding to some clarion call, I seemed to drift into the profession, my teaching has been infected with the same viral drives for nearly 40 years. I have at different times in life embraced – well, held hands with - various quasi-political causes, it’s been education that has contained my revolutionary creed throughout. Whatever picturesque diversions I may have explored through the years, I have known with quiet but unswerving conviction that insomuch as there really are answers, they are to be found in a community of adults & children working & playing together in mutual respect.
In 6 months I retire from teaching. The school I’m leaving – my last school - has been committed for the past 90 years to such a notion of community. It has survived two world wars, a major recession, the Thatcher years &, throughout these times, the flooding & ebbing of the tide of pedagogic fashion. Time - & no great span of it – will tell what will be the effects of a new administration. Change is not only inevitable but necessary, but I hope fervently that those values that have informed practice for so long will be conserved &, to that end, I wish the new Headmaster well for the task before him. I want my departure from this school, & from my profession, to be quiet & undramatic &, even at this relatively early stage, I must accept that what is to come is not to be part of my responsibility.
Meanwhile, let us consider the gritty wisdom of some our greatest thinkers…
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it.
Finley Peter Dunne
School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.
H.L Mencken
The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
Robert Frost
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
Maya Angelou
Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.
Edward de Bono
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Albert Einstein
Education is not the filling of a pail,
but the lighting of a fire.
Wiliam Butler Yeats
The well-meaning people who talk about education as if it were a substance distributable by coupon in large or small quantities never exhibit any understanding of the truth that you cannot teach anybody anything that he does not want to learn.
George Sampson
Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education.
Hugh MacDiarmid
A teacher should have maximal authority and minimal power.
Thomas Szasz
Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
Rachel Carson
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
George Bernard Shaw
We should take care not to make the intellect our God; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Albert Einstein
to be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e. e. cummings
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and, for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it. Always.
Mahatma Gandhi
I was still learning when I taught my last class.
Claude Fuess, after 40 years of teaching
12:35:30 AM 
|
