"The most important factor in any school, or system of education, is the teacher who directs its daily operations." —Edwin G. Hewett.
"It is not sufficient that instructors be completely skillful in those sciences which they profess and teach; but they should have skill also in the art or method of teaching, and patience in the practice of it." — Isaac Watts.
"Instruction must begin with actual inspection not with verbal description of things. From such inspection it is that certain knowledge comes. What is actually seen remains more fixed in the memory than description or enumeration a hundred times as often repeated." — Comenius.
"There was an old type of education that made of every man it touched the scholar and gentleman. Too often our newer type of school training makes only the scholar and omits the gentleman. It is a blend of the two at which the truly artistic teacher aims." — Dr. Henry Suzzallo.
"It is generally agreed to-day that a successful teacher in a vocational field must be primarily equipped as a practical workman. To this equipment of habit, skill and knowledge, it is highly desirable that he should add as much pedagogic ability and general culture as possible." — David Snedden.
"The teacher's happiness and professional improvement both require that he should have an educational creed as an intellectual and moral support. In education, as in religion and politics, a firm belief in certain first principles is necessary in order to give stability to character and to make continuous growth possible!"— W. H. Payne.
"The elementary principles of pedagogics are easily within the comprehends on of anyone otherwise qualified to teach the common branches. With the unsolved problems of psychology the school teacher is not concerned. But to teach any subject properly requires some knowledge of the laws which govern the growth of mind." — J. N. Patrick, Elements of Pedagogics.
"The business of every teacher is to encourage and enthuse every pupil he teaches. He is an artist, and the picture he paints should awaken the ambition of each child, stir his soul with desire to be, and inspire him with confidence that he can be. And if the teacher is keenly alive, a lover of the world, feels the response of its great heart, his task is perfectly possible." — Margaret Slattery.
"Chief of all, teaching, like virtue, is its own reward. Just as the physician frequently gives his most devoted service when he has lost all thought of his fee, just as the clergyman best ministers to the souls of his people when he has forgotten the size of his stipend, so does the teacher best serve the pupils before him when his service is unrelated in his mind to his salary check." — Arthur C. Perry, Jr.
"If it is essential that the teacher approach her work with a clear view of the ends which it is desirable for her to achieve, it is quite as necessary that she be conscious of the factors which condition the teaching process. The school, with its limitations and its advantages, the community and home life of the child, and, above all else, the child him- self, his instincts, impulses, and abilities must be the subject of most careful study."— George Drayton Strayer.
"As a motive for every teacher to study carefully the art of teaching well at the recitation, it should be borne in mind that then and there he comes before his pupils in a peculiar and prominent manner; it is there his mind comes specially in contact with theirs, and there that he lays in them, for good or for evil, the foundations of their mental habits. It is at the recitation in a peculiar manner that he makes his mark upon their minds; and as the seal upon the wax, so his mental character upon theirs leaves its impress behind." — David P. Page.
"Teachers direct too much; they explain too much. They, themselves recite too much; they talk too much. There is far too much of this kind of expression; yet the children do not see, neither do they hear. The consistent, quiet though forceful teacher who has grace enough to keep himself in the background, through his realization that the school is the child's great chance, will find opportunity on every hand to bring the child face to face with real things, to stimulate in them heretofore unthought-of activities." — Elmer Burritt Bryan.
