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I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

John W. Gardner

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John W. Gardner
Age: 89 †
Born: 1912
Born: October 8
Died: 2002
Died: February 16
Author
Politician
LA
California
John William Gardner
John Gardner
Back
Twenties
Tolerated
Look
Wonder
Schooled
Looks
Education
Practiced
Years
Teach
Primitive
School
Schools
Certain
Educational
Today
Entirely
Anything
Twenty

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It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six.
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The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
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Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
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For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.
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Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
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The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.
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Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
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It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
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What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.
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The world loves talent but pays off on character.
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One exemplary act may affect one life, or even millions of lives. All those who set standards for themselves, who strengthen the bonds of community, who do their work creditably and accept individual responsibility, are building the common future.
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Our problem is not to find better values but to be faithful to those we profess.
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When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
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The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.
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One of the reasons people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
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Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
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We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle to growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you must keep on risking failure-all your life.
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We need more than individual value systems we need a shared vision. A nation is held together by shared values, shared beliefs, shared attitudes. That is what enables a people to maintain a cohesive society despite the tensions of daily life. That is what enables them to rise above the conflicts that plague any society.
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Leaders develop their styles as they interact with their constituencies. They move toward the style that seems most effective in dealing with the mixture of elements that make up their constituencies.
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The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
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