William Glasser Quotes

We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.

Since the obvious purpose of pain, misery, and suffering is to tell you something is wrong, fix it, change it, reform, improve, get help; if you don't have the strength to do it, you are stuck with the pain. This is not to say that people with strength don't suffer - they do. They have no immunity to life, but when they feel pain, they get moving or at least they try to do something, and the more strength they have the more successful their efforts are.

We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.

A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, shot a hole in one playing by himself. Disaster.

The more a person perceives that he/she is loved, the less they will interfere with the lives of others.

Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.

While it is easy to blame a teen for not succeeding, there are serious flaws in the school system that make it impossible for many students to feel successful in school.

We learn ...
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we both hear and see
70% of what is discussed
80% of what we experience personally
95% of what we teach to someone else

Addiction, that is, negative addiction, is the third, and in terms of pain, essentially successful choice in the series of choices made by people who are unable to find sufficient love and worth. Each choice - from the initial decision to give up trying to find love or worth, the second choice to take on one or more symptoms, and the final choice of becoming addicted - is a pain-reducing step. The reason addiction is powerful and difficult to break is that it alone of all the choices consistently both completely relieves the pain of failure, and provides an intensely pleasurable experience.

If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.

It is no kindness to treat unhappy people as helpless, hopeless, or inadequate, no matter what has happened to them. Kindness is having faith in the truth and that people can handle it and use it for their benefit. True compassion is helping people help themselves.

It is difficult to live in such a way that all our relationships are in effective control, and usually it doesn't make that much difference as long as some relationships are satisfying. But when you get sick, it is a good idea to review all of them. Some may be more rankling than you are willing to admit. You can review these relationships by yourself; with the help of a friend or family member you trust; with your doctor if he or she can give you the time; or, best of all, with the aid of a good counselor.

Using no control and using humor will build a relationship and make a dent to where the client puts the counselor in their quality world and then begins to relate and seek out the counselor. Effective therapy begins with the acceptance of the therapist into the client's quality world.

The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.

While it is possible that we do know what's right for others, unless they agree with us, trying to force this knowledge on them is usually a disaster.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

If you look around at your family and friends, you will see that the happiest people are the ones who don't pretend to know what's right for others and don't try to control anyone but themselves.

Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.

What we get, and all we ever get, from the outside is information; how we choose to act on this information is up to us.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.

Don't marry someone you would not be friends with if there was no sex between you.

Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship.

The ultimate use of power is to empower others.

There is plenty of competition in a Glasser Quality School in that there is winning but no losing.

When we label anyone 'bad', we will have more trouble dealing with him than if we could have settled for a lesser label.

Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.

Sex is on the minds of most people, especially those who shouldn't be having it.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.

Everybody needs one essential friend.

We may be up against a stone wall, but we don't have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to.

They have this big book called the 'DSM-IV,' you know, that is supposedly written about crazy people, but I think it is a book that is written by crazy people!

When you study great teachers ... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style.

To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It has happened to all of us; we are its victims, are we have no control over it.

You can acquire a lot of knowledge without ever going to school.

When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control.

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.