"You can acquire a lot of knowledge without ever going to school." -- William Glasser
William Glasser, M.D. (born May 11, 1925) is an American psychiatrist.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he is the developer of reality therapy and choice theory. His ideas, which focus on personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation, are considered controversial by mainstream psychiatrists, who focus instead on classifying psychiatric syndromes, and who often prescribe psychotropic medications to treat mental disorders. Glasser is also notable for applying his theories to broader social issues, such as education, management, and marriage, to name a few. Glasser notably deviates from conventional psychiatrists by warning the general public about the potential detriments caused by the profession of psychiatry in its traditional form because of the common goal to diagnose a patient with a mental illness and prescribe medications to treat the particular illness when, in fact, the patient may simply be acting out of unhappiness, not a brain disorder. Glasser advocated the consideration of mental health as a public health issue.
"As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.""Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship.""Don't marry someone you would not be friends with if there was no sex between you.""Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.""Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.""Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.""Everybody needs one essential friend.""Good or bad, everything we do is our best choice at that moment.""I think education is both using and improving knowledge and that changes the whole picture.""I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.""If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.""If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.""If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.""If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior.""In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.""It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.""No human being will work hard at anything unless they believe that they are working for competence.""Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.""Running a school where the students all succeed, even if some students have to help others to make the grade, is good preparation for democracy.""Sex is on the minds of most people, especially those who shouldn't be having it.""Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.""The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn't matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.""There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.""There is plenty of competition in a Glasser Quality School in that there is winning but no losing.""This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.""To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.""Told that the passing grade is a B or competence and that we will help you to get there, students do competent work. The lowest passing grade in the real world is competence. Why do schools accept so much less?""Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, or perhaps later in life, yes when we should say no.""We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives.""We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.""We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we'll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.""We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can't relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he'll never be a competent teacher.""We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.""We may be up against a stone wall, but we don't have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to.""What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.""What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.""When we label anyone 'bad', we will have more trouble dealing with him than if we could have settled for a lesser label.""Without pay, no human being will work up to their ability if he or she is not cared for and respected."
A practicing psychiatrist, he has also authored and co-authored numerous and influential books on mental health, counseling, and the improvement of schools, teaching, and several publications advocating a public health approach to mental health versus the prevailing "medical" model.
During his early years as a psychiatrist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in LA, he met Dr. G. L. Harrington, an older psychiatrist who Glasser credits as his "mentor." Glasser founded The Institute for Reality Therapy in 1967, which was renamed The Institute for Control Theory, Reality Therapy and Quality Management in 1994 and later The William Glasser Institute in 1996. The institute is located in Chatsworth, California, and has branch institutes throughout the world.
By the 1970s Dr. Glasser called his body of work Control Theory. By 1996, the theoretical structure evolved into a comprehensive body of work renamed Choice Theory, mainly because of the confusion with perceptual control theory by William T. Powers, developed in the 1950s.
The Institute for Reality Therapy UK (IRT UK), with its own administration executive, co-ordinates the faculty workshops and practicums in the United Kingdom on behalf of the WGI, leading up to, and including Reality Therapy Certification (RTC). The IRT UK strives to promote and develop choice theory, reality therapy, and lead management in the UK, offering guidance and support to its membership made up of a body of like-minded individuals, committed to their own personal and professional advancement. Support is offered by a team of training and practicum supervisors. Members of the institute subscribe to the 'ethos' that choice theory, reality therapy, and lead management guide and support their relationships both on a personal and professional basis, and that reality therapy should be taught with integrity and adherence to fundamental concepts as described by Dr. William Glasser and others who write, teach, and are associated with the WGI.
