Quotes About Learning

It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;

They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience.

Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.

Lectures, says Minerva's Stephen Kosslyn, are 'a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn'.

The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to instinct.

Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils' or their own strengths, the textbooks are infused with instructions about what to think instead of how to think, teaching methods are more about instructing than learning

When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.

Top–down language teaching just does not work well – it's like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.

Smith's genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem.

In effect, since the process of natural selection is one of extracting useful information from the environment and encoding it in the genes, there is a sense in which you can look on the human genome as four billion years' worth of accumulated learning.

Every behavior is the product of an instinct trained by experience.

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,' Henry David Thoreau asked: 'the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father?

The point is that nothing could be more "instinctive" than the predisposition to learn a language. It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired. It is not learned. It is—horrid thought—genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself. The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.

You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.

If culture consisted simply of learning habits from others, it would soon stagnate. For culture to turn cumulative, ideas needed to meet and mate.

Science is like a hungry furnace that must feed from the the forest of ignorance that surrounds us.

Culture is the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

But the library - especially one so vast - is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it's a world, complete and uncompleteable, and it is filled with secrets.

Failure is just learning. It's just a perspective. Failure is the first part of learning and the process you go through to figure things out.

Having learned to integrate her readings thoroughly into her own thinking and with years of contemplative study, she creates her own theology. She learns to trust her own experience

We become the books we read.