CONNASATEGO

While negotiating a treaty at Lancaster, Pennsylvania in June of 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia invited the Six Nations of the Iroquois to send boys to William and Mary College for a proper education. The next day, Conassatego, speaking for the Iroquois declined the offer as follows:

"We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those colleges and that the Maintenance of our young Men while with you would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you who are so wise must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things and you will, therefore, not take it amiss if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience of it…

"We are however not the less oblig'd by your kind Offer tho' we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentleman from Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take great care of their Education, teach them all we know and make Men of them."

American Indian Quotations--Howard Langer, Greenwood Press 1996

W. B. YEATS

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”.

JOHN DEWEY

Dewey, John—Democracy and Education, The Free Press Paperback Edition 1966, THE FREE PRESS, New York, Collier Macmillan Ltd., London, © Macmillan Company 1916, © John Dewey 1944

“For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his mind. And the body is, of necessity, a well spring of energy; it has to do something…The ‘problem of discipline’ in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind away from its material. A premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. The teachers’ business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.”—Page 141.

“An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory, simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance”—Page 144