“Educate every child to have a good head, good heart and kind spirit.”
“...I always took the rearmost seat in the classroom - it gave me a good view of things. And I must confess, the location taught me more about human nature and justice than could be learned from the professors lectures.”
“The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that pupils take away from school, but their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.”
“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.”
“If you yearn to learn, you’ll learn to earn.”
“Teachers open doors, but you must enter by yourself. Chinese proverb”
“When the Master entered the great temple he asked about everything. Someone said, ‘Who will say that this son of the man of Zou knows about ritual? When he enters the temple, he asks about everything’. The Master heard of it and said, ‘This is the ritual’.”
“Knowing it does not compare with loving it; loving it does not compare with delighting in it.”
“If I raise one corner for someone and he cannot come back with the other three, I do not go on.”
“Progress daily in your own uncertainty. Live in awareness of the questions.”
“I am daily learning To be the reluctant guardian of your memories There was light in those eyes; I miss that”
“I m not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn t necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one s own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn t care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about.”
“After all, what is education, if not the unparalleled means to transcend the self- imposed physical limits of the mind and the body.”
“Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again.”
“There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don t understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them.”
“Psychologically speaking, far from being worthless, a system is indeed necessary, for any kind of human endeavor. A structure aids in the mind’s endeavor of learning. But the moment the mind becomes dependent on the system and starts trusting the system more than the internal faculties of the mind, the very element of education fades away from the system.”
“All knowledge is born in the mind, and circumstances make them manifest.”