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Previous Quotes of the Month for 2020

January

"Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn."

- Benjamin Franklin

February

"One day in the public garden I see, on a small patch of grass under some trees, a father and a two-year-old girl. The father is lying down; the little girl runs everywhere. What joy to run! Suddenly she stops, looks intently at the ground, bends down, picks something up. A twig! A pebble! She stands up, runs again, sees a pigeon, chases it, suddenly stops and looks up into the sunlit trees, seeing what? Perhaps a squirrel, perhaps a bird, perhaps just the shape and colors of the leaves in the sun. Then she bends down, finds something else, picks it up, examines it. A leaf! Another miracle.

"Gears, twigs, leaves, little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?"

- John Holt,
How Children Learn

March/April

"If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn."

- Ignacio Estrada

May/June

"A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest."

- Albert Einstein

July/August

"The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed - it needs to be transformed. The key to this transfor­mation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achieve­ment on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions."

- Sir Ken Robinson

September/October

"Nonviolent Communication teaches that all violence is a tragic expression of unmet needs. With the ongoing cycles of violence that devastate our world, it takes great vision and faith to believe that we can find ways to see each other as fully human and to create a world that meets all our needs. Bringing up our children to speak and live the language of compassion, we embrace that vision and participate in creating that world."

- Inbal Kashtan,
Compassionate Connection

November/December

"Children are born passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of things around them... Children observe, they wonder, they speculate, and they ask themselves questions... If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process, we disturb it. If we continue this long enough, the process stops. The independent scientist in the child disappears."

- John Holt,
Learning All the Time

Articles by John Holt

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