[Highlights] Living, Loving & Learning

I can love everybody in this room if I had the opportunity to know you with equal intensity, and I still would have the same amount of love and the same potential to love that I have right at this moment. I will have lost nothing. But I first must have it. If my love is neurotic, if it’s possessive, if it’s sick, all that I can teach you is neurotic, possessive, sick love. If my knowledge about anything is vast and endless, I can give that to you. And so my responsibility to me is to make myself enormous, full of knowledge, full of love, full of understanding, full of experience, full of everything, so that I can give it to you and you can take it and build it from there.

Imagine what this world would be like if everyone in this room had the opportunity to be encouraged, to be a unique human being. But you know how it seems to me? That the essence of our educational system is to make everybody like everyone else. And when we’ve done that, we consider ourselves very lucky indeed. You see it happening all the time! “I am not interested in your uniqueness. I am giving you me, and to the extent that you can parrot me, I have been a successful teacher.”

from Love in the Classroom in the book “Living, Loving and Learning” by Leo Buscaglia, Educator and Professor

• Author: Leo Buscaglia, PhD
• Full Title: Living, Loving, & Learning
• Buy: Amazon