Quotes About Learning

education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at.

cuando las personas aumentan su curiosidad intelectual y su cultura científica, dejan de creer en milagros.

The errors could have been avoided by mentally moving the who or whom back into the gap and sounding out the sentence (or, if your intuitions about who and whom are squishy, inserting he or him in the gap instead).

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

No learning rule can be entirely devoid of theoretical content nor can the tabula ever be completely rasa." 13

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the arbitrariness of the sign," the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means "dog" just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.

Third, children do pick up the pattern.

the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond. Speech

Could the world be getting not just more literate and knowledgeable but actually smarter?

An adult mind that is brimming with chunks is a powerful engine of reason, but it comes with a cost: a failure to communicate with other minds that have not mastered the same chunks.

The first countries that made the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century, and the countries that have grown the fastest ever since, are the countries that educated their children most intensely.5

Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with.

Though our ignorance is vast (and always will be), our knowledge is astonishing, and growing daily.

Once again, it's good cognitive psychology: people learn by integrating new information into their existing web of knowledge. They don't like it when a fact is hurled at them from out of the blue and they have to keep it levitating in short-term memory until they find a relevant background to embed it in a few moments later.

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than blank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

A definition that is more or less faithful to the way the word is used is "the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.

Conceptual metaphors point to an obvious way in which people could learn to reason about knew, abstract concepts. They would notice, or have pointed out to them, a parallel between a physical realm they already understand and a conceptual realm that they don't yet understand. […] They would be the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible concepts.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't." Though

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything.

El sometimiento de todas nuestras creencias a los juicios de la razón y las evidencias es una destreza antinatural, como la alfabetización y el cálculo, y ha de ser inculcada y cultivada.

Una sociedad sin erudición histórica es como una persona sin memoria: engañada, confundida y fácilmente explotada.

I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.

There are many lessons to learn. Naming just one is next to impossible. However, learning to love and be loved is a good starting point. It will encompass much.