Education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
BEL KAUFMANI so enjoy being old because for the first time I don’t have to do anything-work, teach, study. I feel very good about myself-and at my age I can say no to anything now if I don’t want to do it. What a liberating word.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.
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The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn’t it a magnificent day today?
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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
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The heart has its reasons; it’s the mind that’s suspect.
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Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
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People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.
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Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.
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Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It’s the skim milk that needs good teachers.
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I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.
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… good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere.
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Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.
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I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.
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“Let it be a challenge to you” means you’re stuck with it; “interpersonal relationships” is a fight between kids; “ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline” means call the cops.
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Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
BEL KAUFMAN