Margaret Fuller Quotes

If children haven't been read to, they don't love books. They need to love books, for books are the basis of literature, composition, history, world events, vocabulary, and everything else.

Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.

Reading makes all other learning possible. We have to get books into our children's hands early and often.

Some people may contend that there is no image more charming that a child holding a puppy or kitten. But for me that's a distant second. When I see a child clutching a book... to his or her tiny bosom, I'm moved. Children can possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll. A book comes alive when they read it. They give it life themselves by understanding it.

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

I always feel like my book is a success when I see a child reading it, and they have their pointer finger out, and they kind of keep their place as they look all around the page. I've always been impressed by how children are so observant.

I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.

The Eeyore Educational System sees childhood as a waste of time, a luxury that society cannot afford . . . Put children in school at the earliest age possible; load them down with homework; take away their time, their creativity, their play, their power; then plug them into machines.

The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at anearly age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.

Question four: What book would you give to every child? Answer: I wouldn't give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads. That said, if you're going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind In The Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity.

If you ask, you're a boor. Just accept it. Hillry Clinton loves children! She helped children! She village'd children. She raised children. She wrote a book about it.

A poor child who receives high-quality early childhood development is 40 percent less likely to need special education, twice as likely to attend college and dramatically more likely to survive childhood.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.

I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they're suffering from childhood.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

Writing a book is like rearing children -- willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love.

There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.

The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.

All of the insights that we might ever need have already been captured by others in books. The important question is this: In the last ninety days, with this treasure of information that could change our lives, our fortunes, our relationships, our health, our children and our careers for the better, how many books have we read?

The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.

A children's book is the perfect place where young readers can understand the world because they can take a deep breath and look at it and imagine and contemplate while they're looking at.