Education Quotes (Thus Far) For My Colleagues Jim, Lori, Jen, and Diane

"[T]he most immoral thing one can do is have ambitions for someone else's mind." - Robert Irwin

"Keats speaks of 'negative capability' as the rare gift of being able to hold several contradictory possibilities in mind without jumping to a conclusion. Schools, with their encouragement of the first student with the right answer, do little to build up a tolerance for this sort of creative tension." - Phillip Lopate

"Whatever organizational principles hold together the poems of Rilke, Pound, Garcia Lorca, Vallejo, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Apollinaire, Roethke, Mayakovsky, and so many others, the wonderful poets of this century, they are of a subtler and less mechanical nature than those we were teaching children to follow." - Phillip Lopate

"I remember . . . looking at them, touching them, feeling them from the outside and from the inside, wondering about them because there was wondering to be done, not because there were answers to be found." - Jane Smiley

"[I]t is relatively easy to observe technical proficiency according to objectively established criteria. Unfortunately, the development of technical proficiency is often taken as a proxy for other forms of development, and, following the educational truism that what's assessed usually ends up what's being taught." - Resnick and Wirt, 1996

"[I]n the case of the mind, no study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory." - Plato