If you take men and lock them in a house for five years and tell them to come up with two children and they fail to do that, then we will chop off their heads.
- Robert Mugabe
Racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.
- Ruby Bridges
To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely.
- Maria Montessori
The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child's own natural desire to learn.
What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.
- Lev S. Vygotsky
The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.
My message is really that racism has no place in the hearts and minds of our children.
It's better to have died a small child than to be a politician who gets caught in a scandal during a slow news month.
- Lewis Grizzard
Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.
The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.
Peace is what every human being is craving for, and it can be brought about by humanity through the child.
Each and every one of us is born with a clean heart. Our babies know nothing about hate or racism. But soon they begin to learn – and only from us. We keep racism alive. We pass it on to our children. We owe it to our children to help them keep their clean start.
A child’s greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.
When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.
- Jean Piaget
The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s self. Adults work to finish a task, but the child works in order to grow, and is working to create the adult, the person that is to be. Such experience is not just play... it is work he must do in order to grow up.
Our aim is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core.
The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.
- Che Guevara
Let the children be free; encourage them; let them run outside when it is raining; let them remove their shoes when they find a puddle of water; and when the grass of the meadows is wet with dew, let them run on it and trample it with their bare feet; let them rest peacefully when a tree invites them to sleep beneath its shade; let them shout and laugh when the sun wakes them in the morning.
Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration
The child who has felt a strong love for his surroundings and for all living creatures, who has discovered joy and enthusiasm in work, gives us reason to hope that humanity can develop in a new direction.
There is a great sense of community within the Montessori classroom, where children of differing ages work together in an atmosphere of cooperation rather than competitiveness. There is respect for the environment and for the individuals within it, which comes through experience of freedom within the community.
If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.
- Michel Odent
The child has a mind able to absorb knowledge. He has the power to teach himself.
Treat your old parents as you would like to be treated by your children later.
- Jose Rizal
When children come into contact with nature, they reveal their strength.
When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.
- Angela Davis
If you know someone who has lost a child, and you're afraid to mention them because you think you might make them sad by reminding them that they died-you're not reminding them. They didn't forget they died. What you're reminding them of is that you remembered that they lived, and that is a great gift.
- Elizabeth Edwards
Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life.
What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone
To completely trust in Allah is to be like a child who knows deeply that even if he does not call for the mother, the mother is totally aware of his condition and is looking after him.
- Al-Ghazali
The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.
- Malcolm X
Filipinos don't realize that victory is the child of struggle, that joy blossoms from suffering, and redemption is a product of sacrifice.
The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech
Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.
Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
- W. E. B. Du Bois
Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.
- Urie Bronfenbrenner
Play is the work of the child.
Don't force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.
- Plato
Heaven grew weary of the excessive pride and luxury of China... I am from the Barbaric North. I wear the same clothing and eat the same food as the cowherds and horse-herders. We make the same sacrifices and we share.. our riches. I look upon the nation as a new-born child and I care for my soldiers as though they were my brothers.
- Genghis Khan
In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.
- Crazy Horse
Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.
The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.
All things of creation are children of the Father and thus brothers of man. ... God wants us to help animals, if they need help. Every creature in distress has the same right to be protected.
- Francis of Assisi
The change starts within each one of us. And ends only when all children are free to be children
- Craig Kielburger
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
- Ronald Reagan
Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.
- Nelson Mandela
Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.
In the end, it's not what you do for your children but what you've taught them to do for themselves.
- Ann Landers
Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.
- B. F. Skinner
