In an open letter to teachers, a Holocaust survivor offered these moving and powerful words:

I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college students. So I am suspicious of education.

My request is:

Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.

Quoted in Haim G. Ginott, Teacher and Child (New York: Collier, 1995),  p. 317. Reprinted in When Gifted Kids Don't Have All the Answers (free spirit PUBLISHING, 2002), p. 108