The art of teaching is no shallow affair but one of the deepest mysteries of nature.
— John Amos Comenius (1648), influential Czech educator, philosopher, one of the founding fathers of modern education, author of Orbis Sensualium Pictus
I think one could go through the defects and mistakes of teaching and learning generally and find that they are associated with failure to secure emotional participation.
— John Dewey (1931), influential American philosopher, educational theorist, educational reformer, author
The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil to learn is hammering on cold iron.
— Horace Mann (ca.1868 or before), American education reformer, attorney, abolitionist, politician, a founding father of the Common School
…Two Educational Commandments: "Do not teach too many subjects" and…"What you teach, teach thoroughly".
— Alfred North Whitehead (1916), influential English mathematician, philosopher, educator, popularizer of mathematics
For these reasons, we believe that the problem of devising subtle and valid tests is very hard and very urgent. Independent of the problem of testing, however, is the problem presented by some of the testers themselves.
There is a school of thought which holds, in effect, that whatever tests have been devised at a given moment are ipso facto valid. At least, this is what people must be thinking when they say that educational objectives that can be tested “scientifically” are well-defined, and that the rest is mysticism.
Opposing this view we insist that teaching comes first, and that testing follows it and measures it — or at least tries to.
We are shocked by the callow empiricism which confers honorary validity on whatever measurement techniques it has managed to devise, and confers honorary nonexistence on all aspects of the human psyche that have not yet been explained to an IBM punching machine.
— Cambridge (MA) Conference on School Mathematics: Goals of School Mathematics (1963)
…The most authentic use of achievement tests is to diagnose what students know and can do so teachers can better target instruction toward them. When testing practices are set up to select teachers to fire, educators are incented to raise test scores at any cost, not to use tests to help children learn.
— -Dana Goldstein (2014), contemporary American journalist, author
There is a great danger in the present day lest science-teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding.
— Joseph David Everett (1870), English physicist, mathematician, educator, author
An underlying assumption is that instruction is too important to be left entirely to schools and teachers: It must be closely and carefully managed by higher level agencies…
…It costs state legislators and bureaucrats relatively little to fashion a new instructional policy that calls for novel sorts of classroom work. These officials can easily ignore the pedagogical past, for they do not work in classrooms, and they bear little direct responsibility for what is done in localities—even if it is done partly at their insistence.
However, teachers and students cannot ignore the pedagogical past, because it is their past. If instructional changes are to be made, they must make them. And changing one’s teaching is not like changing one’s socks.
Teachers construct their practices gradually, out of their experience as students, their professional education and their previous encounters with policies designed to change their practice.
Teaching is less a set of garments that can be changed at will than a way of knowing, of seeing, and of being.
— David Cohen (1990), American professor of education, author, reformer
— Deborah L. Ball (1990), contemporary American professor of education, math educator, author, reformer
A task of the teacher is to cultivate a taste and make it a power in the soul. This is accomplished by the aesthetic revelation of the world through instruction.
— Johann Herbart, paraphrased (1806), German philosopher, psychologist, educator, author, a founding father of educational psychology
Standardized tests uphold traditional methods of teaching mathematics that are producing the low test scores in the first place.
— Ralph Abraham (2008), American mathematician, educator, author
Because those of us in education take test scores seriously, the public is reinforced in its view that test scores are good proxies for the quality of education a school provides.
Yet what test scores predict best are other test scores. If we are going to use proxies that have predictive validity, we need proxies that predict performances that matter outside the context of school.
The function of schooling is not to enable students to do better in school. The function of schooling is to enable students to do better in life.
— Elliot Eisner (2002), professor of Art and Education, educationist, reformer, author of The Arts and the Creation of Mind
There is something more sprightly, more delightful and entertaining in the living discourse of a wise, a learned, and well-qualified teacher, than there is in the silent and sedentary practice of reading.
— Isaac Watts (1741), English minister, hymnist, logician, poet, educator, author
…the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future: this is a threefold adventure like no other.
— George Steiner (2002), French-American literary critic, novelist, philosopher, educator, author
The great majority of words cannot be defined exactly (for instance, the word red.) The important thing is not exact definition: it is to know what you are talking about.
— Walter Warwick Sawyer (1943), British mathematician, educator, author, popularizer of mathematics
There is one thing that distinguishes teaching from all other professions, except perhaps the Church — no change in practice, no change in the curriculum has any meaning unless the teacher understands it and accepts it.
If a young doctor gives an injection under instruction, or if an architect as a member of a team designs a roof truss, the efficiency of the injection or the strength of the truss does not depend upon his faith in the formula he has used.
With the teacher it does.
If he does not understand the new method, or if he refuses to accept it other than superficially, instructions are to no avail. At the best he will go on doing in effect what he has always done, and at the worst he will produce some travesty of modern teaching.
— Clarence E. Beeby (1970), New Zealand educator, schoolmaster, educational philosopher, author