What is more important than literacy, numeracy, exam results and knowledge?
This is more important. This is fundamental to everything that should happen in a school. If we don’t teach children to care, to be tolerant and build a better world we are wasting our time.
“I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is:
Help your children become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths or educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”
– An excerpt of a letter written by a Holocaust survivor to educators, published in “Teacher and Child” by Dr. Haim Ginott, child psychologist and author
Hear, hear!
I hear you. Thanks Jennie.
You’re welcome!
Wow… this quote pulls no punches, Opher!
No John – I used to put it in the front of my Pastoral Booklets. I used to tell my staff that nothing, no subject on earth, was more important. They were to stop lessons and process anything that came up. Because that was education.
Wow… That really carries a punch!
It knocked me out Cheryl.
Reblogged this on Impromptu Promptlings and commented:
I was so struck by a quote in one of Opher’s posts yesterday I needed to reblog it. I read a lot of WWII history, and found this to be so profound… Thanks for posting it, Opher. I totally agree.
Yes we need to stop teaching kids to blindly take orders from authority figures and to be uniform just like everyone else. We need to teach them to be unique and beautiful in their own way and to encourage them to be different!
And creative, lateral thinking and enthusiastic, brimming with self-esteem.
Yesss exactly!!
We ought to open a school!