To Teach--Introduction

p. 4--"We are not optimists because we cannot predict a bright and beautiful future, but we're not pessimists either, because the future is unknown and unknowable. We are, rather, active participants in possibility, willing workers in the fields of what could be, but is not yet. We are compelled by love--love of children and youth, love of a world in need of repair--and powered by hope."

p. 5--"The drama of education is the constant and persistent drama of possibility and transformation."

p. 5--"Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life. Democracy is a form of associative living in which people must assume and fight to achieve political and social equality; acknowledge a common spark of humanity in each soul; and embrace a level of uncertainty, incompleteness, and the inevitability of change. There are simply no immutable, fixed standards, the same for all, that will ultimately serve democratic purposes."

p. 6--"In a democracy, teachers must be models of thoughtfulness and care; exemplars of problem solving and decision making; people capable of asking deep questions, drawing necessary connections, incorporating the surprising and unexpected and the new as it occurs in classroom life."

p. 6--"Assessment in a democratic classroom must be transparent and public...[ ]...assessment must become a broad, relevant, and connected part of classroom life, an exercise providing an ongoing look at progress and need."

p. 8--"In a robust participatory democracy, we would operate under the principle that whatever the wisest, most together and connected parents want for their kids, well, that is exactly what we as a community must want for all our children. Exactly."

p. 10--"If you choose to live only in the world as you find it, you surrender too much. You conclude that this is just the way classrooms are, that the inadequacies and the injustices and the failures are simply the real world as it really is, the best you can hope for."

p. 10--"The trick is to live one foot in the world as it is while the other foot strides toward a world that could be but is not yet."

p. 11--"Childhood is a time of invention and discovery, but, mostly, childhood is a time of hope."

To Teach

To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher (3rd Edition)

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