A student is the most important person ever in this school.

Goodreads circulates a longer form and names Becoming an Invitational Leader, but that book passage was not inspected. The checked 1996 school report reproduces this wording and explicitly credits Purkey’s adaptation of a customer poster by J.M. Eaton. This establishes the educational adaptation’s documented circulation by 1996, not its first publication or Purkey’s invention of the underlying maxim.

A school-improvement report opens with a student-centered service poster. Its remaining statements put the school’s work in the service of students and their wish to learn; the attribution identifies Purkey as an adapter, not the creator of the underlying customer-service text.

Serving students is the institution’s central purpose; students should not be treated as interruptions of its work.

Do not present the underlying customer-service maxim as Purkey’s original invention, or the 1996 report as a book he authored. Its explicit credit is an adaptation by Purkey.

Education

• While everything in life adds to, or detracts from, human success or failure, nothing is more important in life than people. It is the people who create a respectful, optimistic, trusting and intentional society.
• People possess untapped potential in all areas of human endeavor. The uniqueness of human beings is that no clear limits to potential have been discovered.
• No one can choose a beneficial direction in life without hope that change for the better is possible.
• It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. Epictetus
• Human potential, though not always apparent, is there waiting to be discovered and invited forth. (paraphrase)

• goodreads.com/author/quotes/1744830.William_W_Purkey

William W. Purkey, Robert M. Markham and Paul Shelly, Coming from Behind: A “Catch-up” Philosophy in Education. The Story of Carver Middle School (Meridian Public School District, October 1996), opening poster What is a Student?; ERIC ED402071, PDF page 3, What is a Student? poster, opening sentence. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/a-student-is-the-most-important-person/ (25 October 2026).

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