Latest Marva Collins Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• One night my son was downstairs studying, and he had been up so late all that week, and my husband said, "I feel so sorry for him." I said, "Look, if he's going to become a surgeon" - he is studying to be a doctor - "he's going to have his hard times. I feel sorry for him too, but if he lives in this world he's going to have more hard times. He's going to stay up some more nights." I think we can't shield them from the hard times, even though we'd like to. I say to the children that I teach and to my own - I can't test the ground for you and tell you that's a safe step there.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Sorry, Husband

  Source: reason.com

• That's how I try to think of education - a school is a miniature society where children learn to function in a real world.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Real, School

  Source: reason.com

• People have to live by rules in the world. Why do we pretend in school that they don't?

  Marva Collins

  School, People, World

  Source: reason.com

• You can't find me 20 children in Chicago, I don't care which section you go in - you can be on Michigan Avenue or here - and they won't be able to tell you that y is a vowel when it's the final syllable in a word, as in Nancy and icy. And no one bothers to teach the rules anymore - "i before e except after c."

  Marva Collins

  Children, Chicago, Finals

  Source: reason.com

• Our children learn the phonetic method, which is why they're very good spellers, I suppose. Because rather than ABC or just saying a word, they'll have to go a as in apple and all the other a's there are in the English language. They learn that when they're four. Children all over America can tell you that a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y are vowels. But you ask them about that "sometimes y," and they can't tell you.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Apples, America

  Source: reason.com

• [Kid] never learned to read in kindergarten, first, and second, so in third grade he begins to be placed in the EMH or the learning-disabled rooms.

  Marva Collins

  Kids, Rooms, Firsts

  Source: reason.com

• Education is the thing. This black-white bit - I don't deal with people that way. I deal with it as if you are another individual. If you do something that perturbs me or aggravates me, I do not think you've done it because I'm black.

  Marva Collins

  Thinking, White, People

  Source: reason.com

• I think what we've done is given children a lot of things that they didn't ask for instead of what they do want.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Thinking, Want

  Source: reason.com

• Everyone who comes in is just amazed that our children do not have the animosity, the hatred, because these children are into it. You know, once you learn to like yourself, then you don't see this black-white bit. I still say that a good basic education is the only thing. I feel guilty sometimes because I don't think Jesus Christ could get any more accolades than I do when I walk through that classroom, even from the children I do not teach. They know that I love them, but I am forever telling them, "Get into that seat so you can have choices in this world."

  Marva Collins

  Jesus, Children, Thinking

  Source: reason.com

• I'm not one of those who say this is the way. I'm not that opinionated. I can only say this is my way. Even the $1,000 scholarship that my son could have gotten from the state of Illinois to go to college, we didn't want. I'd rather get out and work and have my children know that their money comes from their parents and we have to work for it.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Son, College

  Source: reason.com

• I believe the more difficult a child is, the more I want that child. But I won't take a child until the parent brings him to us. So it is just the opposite - we get the ones that no one else will take. We get sawdust, and we have to make boards out of it.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Believe, Opposites

  Source: reason.com

• Parents often brag about the amount of money spent per child, but I think, perhaps ironically, those great monies that are spent - I call it putting a band-aid on a hemorrhage.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Thinking, Parent

  Source: reason.com

• The more monies we spend, the less children learn; because the more machines we have there, the more gadgets, the more gimmicks, the less children have to really think - the less they have to use their innate abilities, their curiosity, their brains.

  Marva Collins

  Children, Thinking, Brain

  Source: reason.com

• We've been brainwashed into thinking that it takes more monies than it actually does to educate children. That's been one of the brainwash jobs.

  Marva Collins

  Jobs, Children, Thinking

  Source: reason.com

• I don't have to be accountable to some authority, which is why I don't take federal funds. I don't want anyone's monies unless they're monies without strings attached. It's not that we don't need them.

  Marva Collins

  Strings Attached, Want, Needs

  Source: reason.com

• A person cannot all of a sudden become good at what they do just by switching streams.

  Marva Collins

  Switching, Streams, Persons

  Source: reason.com

• One of the things that even wealthy children need is an education, and I think the problems I saw really have nothing to do with economics. So I was unhappy with what my own children were getting even in the better schools, and then I was seeing so many children here recruited for failure.

  Marva Collins

  Children, School, Thinking

  Source: reason.com

• I was very, very unhappy with even the so-called very elite schools. The one thing I've always done every day with my children is to watch what they do at school, and I was always a bit unhappy with the academic program. It was a kind of hit and miss.

  Marva Collins

  Children, School, Missing

  Source: reason.com