Aphorisms are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling.
(W. P. Alger)

To know what we do not know is the beginning of wisdom. (Indian saying)

The measure of a person's knowledge is the actions they take. (Saint Francis of Assisi)

Raising Expectations: The atmosphere of formal schooling supports the idea of raising expectations, despite challenges. That was only the beginning I found out. But a lot of us have allowed our dreaming to be cut short, and we force our lower expectations on others to maintain a lower playing field that seems to work in our temporary favor. We become lords of a fallen world, rather than servants to greater good that keeps us ever alive--and true to both our self and others. (Thomas James Darling)

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. (Abraham Lincoln)

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
(George Bernard Shaw)

Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. (F.P. Jones)

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction are we moving. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

If there is technological advance without social advance, there is almost automatically an increase in human misery, in impoverishment.

Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows. (Isaac Asimov)

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
(E.W. Dijkstra)

Aesthetics is for the Artists like Ornithology is for the birds. (Barnett Newman)

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts, or even tasks, than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy. (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964 )

There is something about a monolithic tech culture like microsoft that makes humans seriously rethink fundamental aspects of the relationship between their brains and their bodies -- their souls and their ambitions; things and thoughts. (Douglas Couplant, Microserfs, 1995 )

Your education begins when what is called your education ends. (Justice O.W. Holmes)

Anyone learning without thought is lost, anyone thinking but not learning is in peril.
(Confucius)

What you allow in at the beginning of a new learning cycle affects the final fruit.
(Thomas James Darling)

In education we are striving not to teach youth to make a living, but to make a life.
(William Allen White)

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance. (Claus Moser)

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things the student wants.
(Henry David Thoreau)

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
(E.M. Forster)

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. (Will Durant)

Education is an admirable thing, but nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
(Oscar Wilde)

There is one kind of co-education that everybody believes in — the co-education of teachers and students. (John Dewey)

Education is too important to be left solely to the educators. (Francis Keppel)

Be wary of instructors that attempt to teach around love instead of through love.

(Thomas James Darling)

An education is a wonderful thing; no college should be without one. (Author unknown)

Education is the process of changing blissful ignorance into some other kind of ignorance.
(Author unknown)

The most widespread form of compulsory education is experience.
(Author unknown)

Another thing an education should include is the knowledge of what to do with it.
(Author unknown)

The aim of education should be to teach a person something about everything and then everything about something. (Author unknown)

There must be something wrong with education: there are so many more bright children than grownups. (Author unknown)

Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains. (Eric Hoffer)

Technology enables man to gain control over everything except technology. (Author unknown)

Technology improves things so fast that by the time we can afford the best, there's something better.
(Author unknown)

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. (Bernard Shaw)

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be retaught when the students become teachers.
(G.C. Lichtenberg)

Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.
(Agnes Repplier)

A teacher is a person who knows all the answers, but only when she asks the questions.
(Author unknown)

Good teachers cost a lot, but poor teachers cost a lot more.

It is more important for a teacher to be a stimulant than to be important.
(Author unknown)

One of the important duties of a teacher is to keep a roomful of live wires grounded.
(Author unknown)

Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study than a student.
(William Osler)

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know.
(Woodrow Wilson)

I would live to study, and not study to live. (Francis Bacon)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. (Bertrand Russell)

Education leaves the mass of mankind pretty nearly as it found them, with this single difference: it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity. (Thomas Love Peacock)

There is a substitute for everything, especially for original thinking. (Author unknown)

When you stop to think, don't forget to start again. (Author unknown)

Strengthen me be sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness. (Bronson Alcott)

Many a man's weakness is his fondness for showing off his strength. (Author unknown)

Self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures. (C.N. Bovee)

In the soul of the bureaucratic machine there lurks a control freak. Employees are cogs in a highly regulated machine. Their work is broken down into different functions and described in great detail. Managers do the thinking: workers do the tasks they are assigned. Detailed rules and procedures specify behavior. Inspectors check for compliance.

This model served us well in its day. As long as the tasks were relatively simple and straightforward and the environment stable, it worked. But for the last 20 years it has been coming apart. In a world of rapid change, technological revolution, global economic competition, demassified markets, an educated workforce, demanding customers, and severe fiscal restraints, centralized top-down monopolies are simply too slow, too unresponsive, and too incapable of change or innovation.

David Osborne & Peter Plastrik, in Banishing Bureaucracy, p. 17.

To think and feel we are able, is often to be so. (Joel Hawes)

No one can disgrace us but ourselves. (J. G. Holland)

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.
(C.H. Parkhurst)

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in which direction we are moving.
(O. W. Holmes)

Diligence is the mother of good luck. (Ben Franklin)

All is holy where devotion kneels. (O.W. Holmes)

Busy souls have no time to be busy bodies. (Austin O'Malley)

Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.
(H.D. Thoreau)

Many people live alone and like it, but most of them live alone and look it.
(Gelett Burgess)

If, almost on the day of their landings, our ancestors founded schools and endowed colleges, what obligations do not rest upon us, living under circumstances so much more favorable, both for providing and for using the means of education.
(Daniel Webster)

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think. (Elbert Hubbard)

A rule is a screw that can only be tightened. (Ben G. Watts)

All rules have exceptions. (Terrence McKenna)

No one knows better how nightmarishly frustrating bureaucracy can be than those trapped inside it.
David Osborne & Peter Plastrik

Humiliation and mental oppression by ignorant and selfish teachers wreak havoc in the youthful mind that can never be undone and often exert a baleful influence in later life.
(Albert Einstein)

A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an opportunity. (A.N. Whitehead)

We can't do for another without at the same time doing for ourselves.
(R. W. Trine)

Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and every woman extends backward into her mother and forward into her daughter.
Carl Jung

The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
(H.L. Menchen)

Ideals are the world's masters. (J.G. Holland)

Every man has, at times, in his mind the ideal of what he should be, but is not. In all men that seek to improve, it is better than the actual. — No one is satisfied with himself that he never wishes to be wiser, better, and more holy.
(Theodore Parker)

Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that's the only reason for having anything. Imagine what this world would be like if all along the way you had people say to you, "It's good that you're unique, it's good that you're different. Show me your differences so that may be I can learn from them.
(Leo Buscaglia)

If it seems that I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.
(Newton)

Every artist has a basic impulse pervading his whole life, and that premise can provide the impulse to everything he creates. For me the dominating premise has been the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstances.
(Tennessee Williams)

It makes little sense to espouse excellence and quality in education while at the same time failing to provide challenging teachers and curricula for gifted and talented children. Neglect of bright minds can only result in a deterioration of hopes and accomplishments of individuals and in a serious decline of productivity of our state and nation . . . .

We plan to use the pioneering work of gifted and talented educators in nuturing advanced as well as basic intellectual, academic, and creative problem-solving abilities. A reasonable long-range expectation of this effort is improvement in the quality of decisions and solutions to an array of economic, social, political, and educational problems . . . .

Our thrust for excellence begins with the identification and development to the fullest extent possible of the intellectual and creative resources upon which we all depend. In doing this, we must look carefully at the aspirations and capabilities of each child. As part of this effort, we must do all in our power to help the gifted and talented child seize opportunities and reach high goals.
(Bill Honig, Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of California)

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
(G.K. Chesterton)

Giftedness does not begin or end at childhood, but cycles through humanity according to the wax and wane of individual and collective merit, receptivity, and resolve.
(Thomas James Darling)

At some point in the future a new definition of giftedness may emerge and include individuals who communicate without talking, writing, or gesturing, and persons who sense events before they happen. These and other traits within the domain of parapsychology may be looked upon simply as other capabilities which should be cultivated and used for the benefit of individuals and of society.
(Bonnie Deming)

Education, at best, is ecstatic. (George Leonard)

Teachers of gifted and talented students have a lot of energy, curiosity, and enthusiasm, but some of the youngsters really need motivation. Teachers also need to have respect for individuals and enough background knowledge and confidence that they can say, "Look, that's beyond me. I'll find out." They don't need to know all the answers, because they are not going to know all the answers.
(Bonnie Deming)

Only if you are truly into your own being, possess and value yourself, feel comfortable with and good about yourself, believe in and live your right to be yourself — will you truly enhance self-esteem in those young human beings whose self-esteem, whose lives, are touched by you.
(John Vasconcellos)

Who knows what is going to be ten years from now. If you think back ten years ago, what a difference! How can you teach them now for something that is going to be when they are twenty, twenty-five, thirty? You can't. You have no idea of what it is going to be like. So, really, as far as teaching, I think one of the most important things to teach is how to think — how to look at what is involved in what they are dealing with — how to make a decision.
(Mary Lou Bednasek)

No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green which it awakens into existence needs time to sprout; and it is not always granted to the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith.
(Albert Schweitzer)

What a gifted child needs most is someone to believe in him against all odds before he is fifteeen years old.
(Paul Brandwine)

If I accept the sunshine and warmth, I must also accept the thunder and the lightning.
(Author Unknown)

The problem-solving skills approach is used to help students know that there is more than one process to reach more than one conclusion with any given problem, and that is is useful outside and inside their academic lives.
(Bonnie Deming)

Learning to take our cues from the child and make a corresponding response means learning to heed and respond to the primary process within ourselves as well. A child can teach us an incredible amount if we are willing to learn.
(Joseph Chilton Pearce)

I hear, and I forget.
I see, and I remember.
I do, and I understand.
(Ancient Chinese Proverb)

Self-trust is the first secret of success. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

He who can does. He who cannot, teaches. (George Bernard Shaw)

Those who can't do, or cannot teach, may strive to administer. (Thomas James Darling)

Great teachers release the energy of their students to discover reality and pursue truth. This doesn't happen if the teacher isn't alive to life.

There is nothing more unequal than equal treatment of unequal people.
(Thomas Jefferson)

Mistakes are the raw material of learning. Monkeying with them, tinkering with them, and improving on them is what learning is all about.
(Author Unknown)

When two people think the same about everything, one of them is not necessary.
(Abraham Lincoln)

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

No prototype — no problem — isn't that all the more fertile ground for innovation?
(Thomas James Darling)

Many people believe that decentralization means loss of control. That's simply not true. You can improve control if you look at control as the control of events and not people. Then, the more people you have contolling events -- the more people you have that care about controlling the events, the more people you have proactively working to create favorable events -- the more control you have within the organization, by definition . . . . (Bill Creech)

The fewer the people who care whether it goes right or wrong, the greater the certainty it will go wrong. (Bill Creech)

Nothing so undermines organizational change as the failure to think through who will have to let go of what when change occurs. (William Bridges)

Administrators who are insulated from failure--who feel no consequences for the same--are less likely to acknowledge any urgency for innovation or reform. (Tom Darling)

CHANGE is sometimes necessarily uncomfortable — even painful.
Growing pains, potential embarrassment, and criticism
should not be justifications for failing to move forward in
providing students the best learning opportunities and
nurturing the best academic environment possible.