“We do not need to attend classroom training programmes for everything. Observation opens the windows of knowledge around us”

“Sophia was asked to speak to the students of a local medical school. “Sophia, what do we need to be better doctors?” the students asked. “Doctors,” Sophia said, “need strong stomachs and strong powers of observation.” Then she opened a canister. The putrid smell quickly moved through the classroom. Sophia stuck a finger in the jar, pulled it up, and then licked it. She passed the jar around encouraging each doctor in training to do the same. Each did, and though many felt nauseas, no one got sick. “You all have very strong stomachs,” she said. “But your powers of observation need some work.” “What do you mean?” they asked. “We did just what you did.” “There is one difference,” she replied. “The finger I dipped in the jar was not the finger I licked.”

“The cafe windows wrapped all the way around the observation floor, which gave us a beautiful panoramic view of the skeleton army that had come to kill us.”

“There’s probably no better example of the throttling of creativity than the difference between what we observe in a kindergarten classroom and what we observe in a high school classroom,” she writes in Teach Your Children Well. “Take a room full of five-year-olds and you will see creativity in all its forms positively flowing around the room. A decade later you will see these same children passively sitting at their desks, half asleep or trying to decipher what will be on the next test.”

“Credentials and classrooms are useless unless they lead us toward consciously applying knowledge to improve the quality of our community.”

“We are not living in a private world of our own. Everything we say and do and think has its effect on everything around us.”