In Appreciation of Teachers

Classrooms of the Berlin Metropolitan School, photo by Jens Rötzsch

“In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.”
― Lee Iacocca

"Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher.”
― Phillip Done

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
― Jacques Barzun

“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
― Anatole France

Chinese High School, Singapore, photo by Teo Di Kai

“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Teaching is the highest form of understanding.”
―Aristotle