Student Quotes - page 37
I made true the first English sentence [Albers came from Germany] that I uttered (better stuttered) on our arrival at Black Mountain College in November 1933 [right after the closing of the Bauhaus art school in Dessau Germany, by the Nazi's] When a student asked me what I was going to teach I said: 'to open eyes'. And this has become the motto of all my teaching [famous pupils of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College were for instance the young generation starting American artists, like Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, Ray Johnson and Susan Weil.
Josef Albers
In randori we learn to employ the principle of maximum efficiency even when we could easily overpower an opponent. Indeed, it is much more impressive to beat an opponent with proper technique than with brute force. This lesson is equally applicable in daily life: the student realized persuasion backed up by sound logic is ultimately more effective than coercion.
Jigoro Kano
The objects of instruction in purely scientific mechanics and physics are, first, to produce in the student that improvement of the understanding which results from the cultivation of natural knowledge, and that elevation of mind which flows from the contemplation of the order of the universe; and secondly, if possible, to qualify him to become a scientific discoverer.
William John Macquorn Rankine
There was one all-black student group, the Harriet Tubman Society. Some upperclassmen had started it, about a year before I joined it in my sophomore year. There I first heard people other than my father talk about white oppression, black racial consciousness, and black pride. The black students kept to their own tables in the cafeteria. We talked. No one said "rap" then, but that's what we did. I had some things to contribute, more out of my reading than my experience. I knew about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and George W. Carver, and I had managed to find some books in the public library about our African heritage that few people then studied or talked about; I knew about the Ashanti kingdoms, for instance.
Shirley Chisholm
we teachers used to talk a lot about who fails the teacher or the student-when you have a classroom situation which is rigged entirely against the student, or in which the teacher is too ignorant to teach. Not ignorant of grammar, but ignorant of the students, ignorant of their culture. So, I was thinking very much about our failures, the map of our failures, we who consider ourselves so possessed of language, so articulate.
Adrienne Rich
I've always believed that dreams are maps. You present a dream of a future that's worth working for. I wanted to inspire people. The apocalyptic visions of what's going to happen to us haven't succeeded in melting that frozen sea inside us. You can't expect a student to do the hard work--to know a subject deeply, the way it's required for an engineer, a mathematician, a scientist-if they have no faith in the future.
Ann Druyan
Ben Graham was a truly formidable mind, and he also had a clarity in writing. And, we've talked over and over again about the power of a few simple ideas thoroughly assimilated. ... that happened with Graham's ideas, which came to me indirectly through Warren - but also some directly from Graham. ... And, by the way, Buffett was the best student Graham had in 30 years of teaching at Columbia. ... Buffett became way better than Graham. That is a natural outcome. ... Newton said that, "If I've seen a little further than other men, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants." ... Warren may have stood on Ben's shoulders, but he ended up seeing farther. And, no doubt, somebody will come along in due course and do a lot better than we have.
Benjamin Graham
[O]ur prime responsibility in our several situations is to denounce folly and absurdity for what they are. Unless and until this is done, every successive outbreak of disorder, with its accompanying conditioned reflex of vocal approval for the demands of the disorderly, will mark another stage in the lapse of the universities into anarchy. The central folly and absurdity which cries aloud to be denounced is student participation. There is no, repeat no, rational justification for students to participate in the academic or administrative or disciplinary management of the universities. The whole idea is utterly nonsensical.
Enoch Powell
He was, according to students, an extraordinary teacher, rigorous, picky, not mean-but a teaser. Sometimes. "What did he really mean by that?" a student whispered to me once when I visited his class. "You can write anything you want but you may not mention the weather," he told his classes at City College in New York and at the University of Houston. The weather, the very geography of platitude. Still, he knew about those easy clichés. He knew their ancient usefulness and perseverance. He grabbed them, gave them a good half turn to laugh a social truth into a sentence-he was certainly a sentence maker.
Donald Barthelme
Vygotsky studied the classical German philosophy on a professional level. In his student years began his acquaintance with the philosophy of Marxism, which he studied mainly using illegal editions. At this time was born Vygotsky's interest in the philosophy of Spinoza, who would remain his favorite thinker for the rest of his life.
Baruch Spinoza
...For natural science he [Otto von Bismarck] shewed little interest, and indeed at that time it scarcely could be reckoned among the ordinary subjects of education; philosophy he pursued rather as a man than as a student, and we are not surprised to find that it was Spinoza rather than Kant or Fichte or Hegel to whom he devoted most attention, for he cared more for principles of belief and the conduct of life than the analysis of the intellect.
...He [Otto von Bismarck] astonished his friends by the amount and variety of his reading; it was at this time that he studied Spinoza. It is said that he had among his friends the reputation of being a liberal; it is probable enough that he said and did many things which they did not understand; and anything they did not understand would be attributed to liberalism by the country gentlemen of Pomerania; partly no doubt it was due to the fact that in 1843 he came back from Paris wearing a beard.
Baruch Spinoza
"In his sermons and books, Hinn has portrayed his childhood as that of a social outcast, handicapped by a severe stutter, who was nonetheless a stellar student. But when G. Richard Fisher and M. Kurt Goedelman, two journalists who write for Personal Freedom Outreach, looked into Hinn's youth, they found that both claims were untrue: nobody remembered Hinn stuttering, and he had dropped out of high school after the 11th grade."
Illustration by 4G² Issue #191, January/February 2004.
Benny Hinn
Max Lerner, an educator, journalist and student of American civilization who was for many years a syndicated columnist for The New York Post, died yesterday... He was 89 ... Mr. Lerner was one of the more conspicuous of the post-World War II nonfiction writers, a humanist whose unabashed liberal conscience led him to the political barricades for more than three decades. Many of his concerns now seem prescient. In 1959, for example, in a speech at Douglass College in New Brunswick, N.J., Mr. Lerner called for the formation of an antiwar elite, making it clear that he was worried about what he saw as growing mediocrity among American students.
Max Lerner
As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department. In many ways he reminded me of Frank Thompson. Dick was no poet and certainly no Communist. But he was like Frank in his loud voice, his quick mind, his intense interest in all kinds of things and people, his crazy jokes, and his disrespect for authority. I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two o'clock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybody's word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldn't understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning.
Richard Feynman
...education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. The moral is stentorian. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or the viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of their energy in doing it.
Henry Adams
As long as a society's best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole social organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms. But that belongs to a dying era. We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought that could unite the peasant cutting his hay, the student poring over formal logic, and the mechanic working in an automobile factory. Out of this lack arises the painful sense of detachment or abstraction that oppresses the "creators of culture."
Czesław Miłosz
