“My education taught me a lot, but nothing I needed to learn.”
“It s important to work on our personal growth, and part of that work is learning, and accepting the fact that we are absolutely enough, as we are. Some of our most profound changes manifest by simply embracing who we ve been all along.”
“He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.... You can still live on that shimmering line between your old thinking and your new understanding, always in a state of learning. In the figurative sense, this is a border that is always moving-- as you advance forward in your studies and realizations, that mysterious forest of the unknown always stays a few feet ahead of you, so you have to travel light in order to keep following it. You have to stay mobile, movable, supple.”
“Go wide, explore and learn new things. Something will surely have a kick for you”
“What if . . . What if I am stupid? Like people say?”
“Just cuz you get to the end doesn’t mean you know what happened.”
“We learn and grow Always building on what we know”
“The greatest obstacle to true learning is the inability to say I don t know.”
“For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”
“There is more than one road to spiritual salvation. We discover a philosophical way of living by encountering the world, culling knowledge from all available resources, and thinking reverently about life.”
“You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney, or a hypocritical parson.”
“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.”