This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
John Holt, fully John Caldwell Holt
Man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.
Children | Guidance | Learning | Man | Nature | Need | Rest | Talking | Trust | World | Guidance |
Whatever parent gives his children good instruction and sets them at the same time a bad example, may be considered bringing them food in one hand and poison in the other.
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.
Children | Death | Grave | Harmony | Ideas | Life | Life | Nature | Unity | Will | Blessed | Learn |
John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
I do not believe that children should have to pay for the shortcoming and inequities of the society into which they were born. I do not think that children should have to pay for the real or supposed sins of their parents. And I think it would be shortsighted of a society to produce, by its neglect, a group of future citizens very likely to be unproductive and characterized by bitterness ands alienation.
Alienation | Bitterness | Children | Future | Neglect | Parents | Society | Society | Think |
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and through they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Children | Dreams | Life | Life | Longing | Love | Tomorrow |
Lillian Hellman, fully Lillian Florience "Lily" Hellman
God helps all the children as they move into a time of life they do not understand and must struggle through with precepts they have picked from the garbage can of older people, clinging with the passion of the lost to odds and ends that will mess them up for all time, or hating the trash so much they will waste their future on the hatred.
Children | Ends | Future | God | Life | Life | Passion | People | Struggle | Time | Waste | Will | Understand |
Luther Standing Bear, aka Ota Kte or Mochunozhin
Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the wold world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American.
Birth | Children | History | Land | Legends | Little | People | Public | World |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of meaningful old age.
Age | Children | Learning | Old age | Opportunity | People | Old |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
The time and the quality of the time that their parents devote to them indicate to children the degree to which they are valued by their parents.
Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by innoculating them with the virus that is a thousad times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
People |
Our children are growing up now in an ethically polluted nation where substance is being sacrificed daily for shadow.
Children |
Just because a child’s parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education, proper nutrition. Clearly we ignore the needs of black children, poor children, and handicapped children in the country.
Care | Children | Education | Health | Parents | Reason | Rights | Child |
The male form of a female liberationist is a male liberationist - a man who realizes the unfairness of having to work all his life to support a wife and children so that someday his widow may live in comfort, a man who points out that commuting to a job he doesn’t like is just as oppressive as his wife’s imprisonment in a suburb, a man who rejects his exclusion, by society and most women, from participation in childbirth and the engrossing, delightful care of young children - a man, in fact, who wants to relate himself to people and the world around him.
Care | Children | Comfort | Life | Life | Man | People | Society | Unfairness | Wants | Wife | Work | World | Society |
Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
The dutifulness of children is the foundation of all virtues.
Children |