Marva Collins Quotes

The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.

Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide.

None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success.

Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.

There is a lot of money to be made from miseducation, from the easy to read easy to learn textbooks, workbooks, teacher manuals, educational games and visual aids. The textbook business is more than a billion-dollar-a-year industry and some of its biggest profits come from 'audio-visual aids' - flash cards, tape cassettes, and filmstrips. No wonder the education industry encourages schools to focus on surface education.

Kids don't fail. Teachers fail, school systems fail. The people who teach children that they are failures, they are the problem.

An error means a child needs help, not a reprimand or ridicule for doing something wrong.

Death cannot put the brakes on a good dream.

I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities.

Determination and perseverance move the world; thinking that others will do it for you is a sure way to fail.

Readers are leaders. Thinkers succeed.

The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats and dogs.

Students do not need to be labeled or measured any more than they are. They don't need more Federal funds, grants, and gimmicks. What they need from us is common sense, dedication, and bright, energetic teachers who believe that all children are achievers and who take personally the failure of any one child.

If you can't make a mistake, you can't make anything.

Until kids decide, 'I am a miracle. I am unique. There is no one else exactly like me,' they can never draw the conclusion, 'Because I'm a miracle, I will never harm another person who's a miracle like me.' In this slippery world, they all need something to hang on to.

Everything works when the teacher works. It's as easy as that, and as hard.

Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.

Praise is essential in developing the right attitude toward learning and toward school.

There is a brilliant child locked inside every student.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.