Felix Adler Quotes

I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.

Kids are generally rotten until the age of about six, when they become people.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

Nothing is more important to our shared future than the well-being of children. For children are at our core - not only as vulnerable beings in need of love and care but as a moral touchstone amidst the complexity and contentiousness of modern life.

If I had a child of school age, I would send him to one of the Waldorf Schools.

Do not feed children on maudlin sentimentalism or dogmatic religion; give them nature

We must destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent.

People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch.

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.

What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.

The best security for old age: respect your children.

One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers.

With age comes wisdom. You don't need big boobs to be feminine. Look at Liberace.

A true knowledge of Jesus is our greatest need and our greatest happiness.

Our children need to be able to see us take a stand for a value and against injustices, be those values and injustices in the family room, the boardroom, the classroom, or on the city streets.

A glory gilds the sacred page, Majestic like the sun, It gives a light to every age, It gives, but borrows none.

There must be provision for the child to have contact with nature; to understand and appreciate the order, the harmony and the beauty in nature.

It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. The true object of juvenile education, is to provide, against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn. Whatever will inspire habits of industry and observation, will sufficiently answer this purpose.

Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.

What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something - catch something - they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children.

I studied voice and piano as a child, although, at least with voice, you start over at puberty, because your voice completely changes.

My goal was not to have huge luxuries. As a child, I wanted a house with a garden, which I have today. This is what I dreamed of. I’d never worry about age if I knew I could go on being loved and having the possibility to love... So it isn’t age or even death that one fears, as much as loneliness and the lack of affection.

English children have lost their innocence, for their first lessons have been in the exploitation of their adult slave.