This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
[Learning] must never be imposed as a Task, nor made a Trouble to them. There may be Dice and Playthings with the Letters on them to teach Children the Alphabet by playing; and twenty other Ways may be found, suitable to their particular Tempers, to make this kind of Learning a Sport to them.
Children seem to learn to talk by inventing their own words and rules: by experimenting with language. Children make statements to adults and then wait for adults to put the statements into adult language so they can make a comparison… If the adult says nothing or simply continues the conversation, the child assumes his or her utterance is correct. When adults “correct” – that is, expand in adult language what the children have said – they are providing feedback. The adult and the child are actually speaking different languages, but they understand the situation, the child can compare their different ways of saying the same thing.
Children | Conversation | Language | Nothing | Words | Child | Learn | Understand |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.
Earnestness | Life | Life | Zeal |
The number of different objects in the world is infinite, while the qualities they possess are limited. These qualities are therefore like the letters of the alphabet which can make up an indefinite number of words. If we present the children with objects exhibiting each of these qualities separately [and “classified in an orderly way”], this is like giving them an alphabet for their explorations, a key to the doors of knowledge.
Children | Giving | Knowledge | Present | Qualities | Words | World |
The most striking [way in which children respond to external influences] and one that is almost like a magic wand for opening the gate to the normal expression of a child’s natural gifts is activity concentrated on some task that requires movement of the hands guided by the intellect.
How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school. It is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas enter into every phase of life, they should have been so little utilized as instruments of education.
Children | Citizenship | Democracy | Education | Humanity | Ideas | Life | Life | Little | Practice | Spirit | Time |
Small children disturb your sleep; big children, your life.
Everyone likes to think that they have done reasonably well in life, so that it comes as a shock to find our children believing differently. The temptation is to tune them out; it takes much more courage to listen.
Children | Courage | Life | Life | Temptation | Temptation | Think |
Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
There are many things children accept as “grown-up things” over which they have no control and for which they have no responsibility – for instance, weddings, having babies, buying houses, and driving cars. Parents who are separating really need to help their children put divorce on that grown-up list, so that children do not see themselves as the cause of their parents’ decision to live apart.
Cause | Children | Control | Decision | Need | Parents | Responsibility |
No two individuals have the same vision of life. It is said that only children and sages are happy because the child has not developed a material sense of value and the same knows that the material has no value. To them form is not the point of consideration but living life.
Children | Consideration | Happy | Life | Life | Sense | Vision | Child | Value |
In the kingdom of God there is no invidious distinction, and therefore this dispensation gathers all men and nations, all races and tribes, the high and the low, and seeks to establish one vast brotherhood among the children of the great God, who hath made of one blood all nations of men.
Brotherhood | Children | Distinction | God | Men | Nations | God |
Michael Dorris, fully Michael Anthony Dorris
Protecting children from racism is every bit as important as insuring that they avoid playing with electrical sockets. Poison is poison, and ingrained oppressive cultural attitudes are at least as hard to antidote, once implanted, as are imbibed cleaning fluids. No one gains by allowing an inequitable and discriminatory status quo to persist.
Riane Eisler, fully Riane Tennenhaus Eisler
When children experience violence, or observe violence against their mothers, they learn it's acceptable--even moral--to use force to impose one's will on others. Indeed, the only way they can make sense of violence coming from those who are supposed to love them is that it must be moral.
Children | Experience | Force | Love | Sense | Will | Learn |
Joan G. Cooney, fully Joan Ganz Cooney
Cherishing children is the mark of a civilized society.