William Scott Quotes

The class has become over the years fairly large, running to three hundred or more, but I always insist upon reading all the student folklore collections myself. Although this is a tall order, I look forward to it because I learn so much from it.

Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don't seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn't have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.

I don't know whether I much enjoyed education. I was not academically gifted.

Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.

The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.

It's kind of hard to rally around a math class.

The presentation of mathematics in schools should be psychological and not systematic. The teacher, so to speak, should be a diplomat. He must take account of the psychic processes in the boy in order to grip his interest, and he will succeed only if he presents things in a form intuitively comprehensible. A more abstract presentation is only possible in the upper classes.

I was always a slow reader, from the very beginning. I remember in first grade our teacher divided us into groups, and I was definitely in the slow group. She didn't call it that, but everybody in the class knew. But I still loved reading. Being a slow reader affected my grades in school, but it didn't affect my love for reading. I still loved going to the library, and I still loved reading books.

One-hundred facts about Vietnam and we studied the fact sheet and got in to these arguments and it was fantastic, and I remember one moment when we heard two students saying don't talk to those guys, meaning my brother and me. They've just memorized that stupid fact sheet. And we thought, gosh do we sound that good? It didn't seem possible. But that was my introduction to politics.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

If we think back through our own lives, the subjects that you liked best in school almost certainly were taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teacher you liked best was the teacher who cared about the subject she taught.

We're in English class, which for most of us is an excruciating exercise in staying awake through the great classics of literature. These works - groundbreaking, incendiary, timeless - have been pureed by the curriculum monsters into a digestible pabulum of themes and factoids we can spew back on a test. Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

I guess for me Hemingway is a lot like it is for others: he goes down well when we are young.

How many students ... were rendered callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in which learning was experienced by them?

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

We learn a lot, and each museum ends up having its own distinctive character and personality.

Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

Is it life, I ask, is it even prudence, To bore thyself and bore the students?

Education is not an affair of 'telling' and being told, but an active and constructive process.

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

If I were a headmaster, I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.