"One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child." - Maria Montessori

"Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed." - Maria Montessori

"Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialised abilities for thinking about a variety of things" - Lev Vygotsky

"The academic curriculum values two abilities above all others: a particular soft of critical analysis and short-term memory....But what about others whose real interests or abilities lie elsewhere? For them education has always been an alienating experience. The sense of alienation is compounded by the structures of schooling: the subject divisions, the 40 minute periods, the bells and the queues."
- Sir Ken Robinson

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
-Alvin Tofler

"The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in the studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."
-Malcolm Gladwell

"It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself."
-Joyce Maynard

About punishing children - "Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse?" - Jane Nelsen