• Education is the process of energizing the total self to progress along a worthy path towards a worthy goal.  
• The teacher is never born without her student learning.  Isn’t the student the father of the teacher?
• Leave childhood to whom it belongs.  Rob not the precious gift off its rightful owners.  Fill it if we can, with added thrills and wonders. Let the owner marvel at his precious gift…. Let him explore, discover, grow and glow…. ! Forget not that “the father of the man” will never return!
• When the cat climbs the tree in a wink, the dog can only watch in awe. When the dog explodes into a thunderous bark to ravage the thief, the cat can only heave a sigh of relief.  When the nightingale sings a musical melody, the cat and the dog can only prick their ears up and listen. Yet, is there anything wrong – unless we expect the dog to climb the tree and the cat to sing a song…? Let our kids do what they are good at. Let us stop judging them on what we fancy… Stop assessing them on what they are not made for.  Education should refine to differentiate: to productively capture and foster the strengths and uniqueness of each child – and to enrich collective living. Blindly “commonising” talents and skills can only slaughter creativity and forward potentials. ‘Commonise’ expectations to the minimum essential, the non-harming essential.                                                                   (inspired in part by Albert Einstein)
• Once, Michelangelo was working on a statue. He had been at the job for long, retouching small details. This seemed foolish and trivial to many.  A friend mustered the courage to walk up to the great master:  “You were finishing the same statue when I saw you last, weeks ago”.  “Yes, but I retouched this part, brought out that muscle, softened these lips and gave more energy to the hind-limb”.  “These are trifles”, retorted the friend. “Why do you waste time on these trifles when you could move on and do something more tangible?” Michelangelo replied calmly: “Trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle.”
• If you want to know how stupid our schools -in other words we – are, read about Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. I derive no joy in mocking at formal education, my bread and butter! I am only hoping that our schools become more educated and equipped to do their duties better. Schools have a responsibility to discover kids, explore into the wealth that lie buried in them. Schools should exist to inspire kids to discover who they are and what they really can do. Providing them the environment to explore, discover, think, internalize and act is what schools ought to do. Let kids excel at what they really are capable of, what they have come here with. Let them experience, assimilate, grow and glow. Summative Assessments should just certify where they stand in terms of their developed worth and qualities at crucial points in life.
• “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands,” said Michelangelo. The teacher has to work with her brains too. But, she will never be a teacher unless her brains work through her heart.
• Education is to draw out the best in the individual for his own good and the good of the society of which he is an integral part.  It is the duty of “education” to address social, intellectual, physical, spiritual, moral and mental dimensions of life and existence. Teaching therefore, should be a synthesized and harmoniously integrated package providing all the necessary inputs, energy and stimulants towards wholesome man-making. 
• We need to get out of the confines of “text-books” and transcend boundaries. We need to integrate larger goals of education into our curriculum delivery techniques.
• Teacher is anything, dead or alive that creates the right context for learning to happen. The human teacher, however has a choice to consciously create contexts. The more directive power and energy she packs into the context, the greater the learning outcome will be. Teacher is an expert context creator.  She should be. But she will do well also to remember that, that ‘directive energy’ has a subjective dimension.  
• Teaching is the art and science of having the student learn.
• Learning is discovering with insight, understanding and empathy. It is about unfolding, assimilating and internalizing.  Exploring, constructing and creating are the means. 
• Indoctrination, heartless rote-learning, individuality-blunting comparison, destructive competition and cramming the brain with dead bits of information should become unknown to our schools.  Anything that would rob childhood from its rightful owners and make them victims of left-brain subjugation, should become taboo.
• If intelligence and power stop the head from descending in humility to wed the heart, all our education will culminate in disaster!
• Learning is what happens when you meet the right context.
• Children are or hope, our inspiration, our destiny. They are the kings and queens of tomorrow. The quality of the world of tomorrow is determined by the quality that children attain as students today.
• “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set her free.” words of Michelangelo! Meditate deeply on these words and we will set free the teacher in us. And for sure, hundreds of younger angels will follow!
• School is an interacting complex. – a complex in which students, parents, community, teachers and the management interact and partner to enrich one another. Success depends on how effectively and responsibly they interact and partner to evolve a shared, and inspiring goal – a goal that is unmistakably worthy!
• Education should expand to differentiate- to productively capture and foster the strengths and uniqueness of each child to enrich himself for collective living.
• Rescue education from the pages of the text-books. It is worth the labour.
• Teacher is an influence that stimulates, provokes, frees, binds and then frees again!     

• Michelangelo was working on a statue. Weeks and months passed! He kept retouching itty-bitty details indefatigably. It seemed crazy to many. One of them mustered the courage to head the great master. “Sir, said he, “why do you waste your time on these trifles when you could move on and do something more tangible?” With a smile on his face Michelangelo quipped: “Trifles make perfection and perfection is no trifle.”
• It takes time to do a job well. This couldn’t be truer of  anything but education and school improvement. Most institutions today are obsessed with grabbing all the golden eggs at one go by killing the goose.  It is not important how fast the job is done, but it does matter how well it is done. Undue speed in educational change can kill the goose and steal even that single egg.  And in most cases, the goal is likely to be material gains and not educational reform.
• Martin Luther King Junior once said, “If a man is called to be street-sweeper, he could sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry”, that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘here lived a great street-sweeper who did his job well.”   And it should not be by competing and comparing. It should be by excelling. ‘Excellence’ is an inward quality.  It makes no noise and can be easily missed and ignored too.
• Children are our hope, our inspiration, our destiny. They are the kings and queens of tomorrow. The quality of the world of tomorrow is determined by the quality that they attain as students today. 
• It is not about books, information or degrees, however desirable they may be. It is the experience and developmental input that children receive today. These would determine what they become as adults tomorrow and how they influence the world around them. It is this thought that might have prompted William Wordsworth to say, “Child is father of man.”   It is of tremendous importance, therefore, that children grow up in the right atmosphere amidst love, affection and the right developmental messages. If they do, they grow up to be productive, happy, socially-sensitive individuals, thinkers, scientists and leaders… I certainly don’t deny that a child also has an ‘inner-self’ independent of the socio-learning environment we engulf him with, that may processes anything quite originally to make him rise above them. But generally the learning and social environments exert an over-riding influence.
• School is an interacting complex – an interacting complex where students, parents, community, teachers and the management partner. Success depends on how effectively the partners interact and contribute harmoniously to a common shared goal.
• It takes time. It may go wrong. Let us persist, persevere and NEVER QUIT. We will see light at the end of the tunnel.
• John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 – 1892) wrote:

“When things go wrong,

As they sometimes will,

When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,

When the funds are low and the debts are high,

And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,

When care is pressing you down a bit –

Life is queer with its twists and turns,

As everyone of us sometimes learns,

And a many a failure turns about

When he might have won had he stuck it out.

Don’t give up though the pace seems slow –

You may succeed with another blow.

Success is failure turned inside out –

The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,

And you never can tell how close you are,

It may be near when it sees so far;

So stick to the fight when you are hardest hit

It’s when things seem worst that you mustn’t quit.”

• “Nothing will take the place of persistence”, observed Calvin Coolidge. “Talent will not: Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not: Unrewarded genius is a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are important.
• “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal”. It is a journey, not a destination. And it takes vision, ability and persistence.
• Education is a journey, progressing to a worthy end.  A maze of the explored, the less explored and the grossly unexplored may make the journey complex and sometimes unpredictable. Some travelers stay safe on the known; Some dare to venture. Strangely, most of those who prefer to stay safe end up being mediocre. The daring, invent and create. Their creations and inventions benefit even those who defied them. They make this world a better place to live in.
• The world without Einstein, Abraham Lincoln,  Jiddu Krishnamurthy, Rabindranath Tagore and M.K. Gandhi would not be a ‘zero’.  But, it would be disturbingly different! And what impact would they have made if they did not look beyond what they saw, hear beyond what they heard and feel beyond what they felt?!        I can hear a remote voice say that some of them had nothing to do with education! If transforming the human mind, thought and society is not education, what is it?
• Education should inspire exploration and discovery. It is the means to unearth, find and ignite the wealth that lies buried deep within the individual, the society and everything else in the larger interacting complex that creates and sustains life. The unearthing should be engineered and coordinated to bring out a harmonious, productive and potent blend of their collective best. If it does not,  what you have is the death of education. Education is to lift man from the lowest form of existence to the highest in its physical, psychological, intellectual, emotional, material and moral dimensions to pave for happiness and fulfilment. 
• Planning is an investment in ‘future’.  It is like a road that leads you towards where you want to go.  Just that you have to keep your options open and alternatives ready: If the chosen road gets submerged, you should have a tangible choice to sail to your destination.
• Competition is good.  Just that it has to be turned inward into oneself. Competition turned inward, is creative. It is constructive and productive and can bring out one’s latent best. When turned outward, competition becomes destructive. Outwardly oriented competition is a lethal weapon of self-shrinking and unproductive comparison – unconcerned, ego-centrism. Competition turned outward into others confirms our animal ancestry. Most human miseries stem from such competition.
• Degrees and qualifications do not confirm any one’s educational status, though ideally they should!. Some of our great men, great scientists and thought leaders had very little formal education, let alone degrees! Isn’t it time to spare a little thought on the matter to reconstruct our educational vision?
• Text books are not the ‘be all and end all’ of education. They are merely means to an end – just tools to make education happen. You cannot mistake the tools to dig the well from the well itself or the water you are in search of! Confusion between the means and the end can be disastrous. We need to rescue education from the pages of our text-books.
• No human being can exist in isolation. Nor can human societies. They form part of a larger reality, a much larger complex, an integral whole of interacting elements that create and sustain themselves. Education is morally bound to this reality.
• Schools are not places where you undertake formal studies to pass examinations. School is where you must be trained for life, where you should internalize values, learn skills, nurture inherent potentials and strengthen and harmonize your intellectual and emotional foundations without being victimized. They are not devices to stuff your brain with rote information or just learn reading writing and arithmetic. Schools must get children to explore into themselves and discover their inner treasure.  bringing the head and heart together, fostering “whole brain thinking” and stimulating creativity should be among the primary objectives of school education.
• Your child is a great human being in the making. Who knows who the little wonder is: an Einstein, Picasso, Marie Curie, Abrahama Lincoln, MK Gandhi, Mother Teresa or Rabindranath Tagore! Would you want to take a chance?