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Otto Wagner
b. 7-13-1841; Vienna
d. 4-11-1918
Otto Wagner, a professor of architecture, designed a new city plan for Vienna, but only his urban rail network, the Stadtbahn, was built.
Wagner also published a textbook entitled Modern Architecture espousing the use of new materials and new forms to reflect the fact that society itself was changing.
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Louis Wain
b. 8-5-1860; London
d. 7-4-1939
The artist-illustrator Louis Wain is best remembered for his drawings featuring anthropomorphised large-eyed cats and kittens that were very popular in Victorian England.
Wain attended the West London School of Art, and taught there for several years before he turned to freelance work of country houses and livestock at agricultural shows.
The cat portraits were inspired by the family cat named Peter who was great comfort for his wife Emily as she suffered with cancer. Wain taught Peter to “wear glasses and pretend to read”, in order to amuse Emily.
Author H. G. Wells said of Wain, “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”
• music posters
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Eugenius Warming
b. 11-3-1841; Denmark
d. 4-2-1924
Botanist Eugenius Warming was a main founding figure of the scientific discipline of ecology, writing the first textbook (1895) on plant ecology and teaching the first university course in ecology.
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Booker T. Washington
b. 3-5-185?, Franklin Co., VA
d. 11-15-1915
Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery, went on to become a foremost black educator and leader as the founder of Tuskegee Institute, one of the leading African-American educational institutions in America.
Booker T. Washington quotes ~ “I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”
• more Booker T. Washington posters
• more Black History Biographical Timeline posters
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Alice Waters
b. 4-28-1944; Chatnam, New Jersey
Chef and restaurateur Alice Waters was trained as a Montessori teacher.
From the back cover of Edible Schoolyard: More than a decade ago, Alice Waters, a small group of teachers and volunteers, and a school principal, turned over long abondoned soil at an urban public middle school in Berkeley, California, and planted the Edible Schoolyard. ...
Alice Waters quote ~
• “Kids come into the classroom and it's very hands-on, ... Kids like this. After phys ed, it's their favorite class.”
• Sharing Food Lesson Ideas
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Noah Webster
b. 10-16-1758; West Hartford, CT
d. 5-28-1843
Noah Webster, lexicographer, textbook author, spelling reformer, political writer, and editor, is known as the “Father of American Scholarship and Education.” His Blue Back Speller was the text for five generations of children in the United States.
Noah Webster quote ~
• “Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.”
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Alfred North Whitehead
b. 2-15-1861; England
d. 12-30-1947; Cambridge, MA
Author Alfred North Whitehead is best remembered as a mathematician, philosopher and educator. He collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic.
Quote from poster: “Disinterested scientific curiosity is a passion for an ordered intellectual vision of the connection events. But the goal of such curiosity is the marriage of action to thought. This essential intervention of action even in abstract science is often overlooked. No man of science want merely to know. He aquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover. The pleasure which art and science can give to toil is the enjoyment which arises from successfully directed intention. Also it is the same pleasure which is yielded to the scientist and to the artist.” The Aims of Education, 1947
Alfred North Whitehead quotes ~
• “Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.”
• “The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.”
• “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
• “Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”
• “Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.”
• “If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.”
• “Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
• “Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct form ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.”
• “Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.”
• “Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.”
• “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.”
• “Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.”
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Eliot Wigginton
b. 11-9-1942; West Virginia
Eliot Wigginton is an oral historian, folklorist, writer and former educator most widely known for the series of Foxfire books consisting of field reports by high school students from Rabun County, Georgia. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989.
Eliot Wigginton quote ~
• “Teaching is too vital an occupation to be left to the lazy or greedy or negative,”
• “Life isn’t worth living unless you’re willing to take some big chances and go for broke.”
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Laura Ingalls Wilder
b. 2-7-1867; Pepin, WI
d. 2-10-1957; Mansfield, MO
Laura Ingalls Wilder, who taught in one room country schools as a young woman, said the reason she wrote the books known as the “Little House” series was “to preserve the stories of her childhood for today's children, to help them to understand how much America had changed during her lifetime.”
FYI - Author and editor Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter, was a collaborator for the books.
Laura Ingalls Wilder quote ~
• “The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.”
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Emma Willard
b. 2-23-1787; CT
d. 4-15-1870
Emma Willard was a writer and women's rights advocate founding the first women's school of higher education in 1821, the Troy Female Seminary, later renamed the Emma Willard School (1895). Among notable students over the years were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Justine Johnstone, Jane Fonda and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Emma Willard quotes ~
• “Genuine learning has ever been said to give polish to man; why then should it not bestow added charm on women?”
• “If, then, women were properly fitted by instruction, they would be likely to teach child wseries ren better than the other sex; they could afford to do it cheaper; and those men who would otherwise be engaged in this employment might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the nation, by any of those thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred.”
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Mary Lou Williams, née Mary Elfrieda Scruggs
b. 5-8-1910; Atlanta, GA
d. 5-28-1981; Durham, NC (cancer)
Self taught pianist Mary Lou Williams grew up in Pennsylvania, working as early as age six to help support her large family. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements, and recorded over a hundred records with such greats as Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, as well as being a friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.
• Mary Lou Williams on Culture Map poster
• Piano Lesson collage by Romare Bearden
• Live at the Keystone Korner, CD
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Edward O. Wilson
b. 6-10-1929; Birmingham, AL
Biologist, naturalist, conservationist, author and professor, E. O. Wilson, is a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. His specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants; he originally chose to study insects because he lost the sight in one eye as a child and observing at a distance was difficult, however a shortage of pins during WWII caused him to switch to ants that could be stored in a vial. Adaptation?
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Carter Godwin Woodson
b. 12-19-1875; New Canton, VA
d. 4-3-1950; Washington, DC
Historian, author, and journalist Carter G. Woodson is best remembered as the “Father of Black History” and for establishing Black History Week that is now Black History Month.
Woodson, the son of former slaves, was self taught up to entering Douglass High School at age 20, where he earned a diploma in two years. Woodson then taught school and went on to earn a degree from Berea College (1903), and advance degrees from the University of Chicago (1908) and Harvard University (1912).
FYI ~ Woodson's parents, James and Elizae Riddle Woodson, moved their family to West Virginia when they heard that a high school for blacks was being built.
Carter G. Woodson quotes ~
• “I am a radical.”
• “In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.”
• “This crusade is much more important than the anti-lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”
• “The mere imparting of information is not education.”
• “When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”
• “Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.”
• “In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent.”
• “If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.”
• “The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.”
• “The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.”
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Howard Zinn
b. 8-24-1922; Brooklyn, NY
d. 1-27-2010; California
Professor Howard Zinn taught political science at Boston University from 1964 to 1988. Among his more than 20 books was the influential “A People's History of the United States”.
Howard Zinn quotes ~
• “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”
• “If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”
• “I'm worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they're doing. I'm concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that's handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”
• “(Nationalism is) a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands.”
• Peace Education posters
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In the United States a polished apple is a traditional gift for the teacher and a symbol of education. I always associated the apple with the “forbidden” fruit of knowledge in the story of Eve and the Garden of Paradise.
• food posters
• goddess posters
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