Quotes on Students

Far from a Harvard student, just had the balls to do it

High school students ought to seek out campus communities where they feel not only empowered to engage their talents, but also challenged to leave their comfort zones. The ability to embrace new opportunities emerges, in part, from a willingness to take risks and to fail.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

The 'safe spaces' for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment.

For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.

Learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading, language arts and math, and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems.

This is the sense in which I am obliged to be a listener. To listen to the student's doubts, fears, and incompetencies that are part of the learning process. It is in listening to the student that I learn to speak with him or her.

We should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity … by actually talking with them.

The wrong things are predominantly stressed in the schools - things remote from the student's experience and need.

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

My message to students is that if you want to become an entrepreneur and save the world, definitely don't skip college. But go to a school that you can afford. You'll be freed from the chains of debt and succeed on your own ambition and merit.

I've been telling my students, 'Imitate, imitate.' And they say, 'Well, what if I plagiarize, or what if I'm not original? I want to be myself.' And I always tell them, 'Your self will shine through'... If you allow yourself to feel deeply and honestly, what you say won't be like anyone else.

When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.

Too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioural consequences.

Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright - reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.

Hypotheses are lullabies for teachers to sing their students to sleep.

Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.

My definition of Blues is that it's a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it's the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don't do it.