Quotes About Learning

There are numerous hints that trade, like the spiny lobsters' seasonal parades, may have been stamped by the Baldwin Effect into human DNA. Animal behaviorist Frans de Waal feels that humans offer each other presents (and expect returns) much more often than other primates do. This tendency shows up just a few years after birth, when children are often driven by instinct more powerfully than by what they've learned.

The basic rule of learning machines is one we've already seen: turn on the juice to components which have a grip on the problem at hand and turn off the power to those components which just can't seem to understand. Inner-judges help decide whether the components in which they reside will be enriched or will be denied, then they aid in carrying out the sentence.

Inner-judges measure our contribution to the social learning machine by two yardsticks: (1) our personal sense of mastery; and (2) the hints we get from those around us telling us whether they want us eagerly or couldn't care less if we disappeared like a blackhead from the face of decent society.

It may be, said he, that the wisdom of little children flies higher than our heavy wits can follow.

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.

a good education is a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, because each enrich the other. The accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient without action

The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. "Knowledge does not keep any better than fish," he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent.

The resources of a university, of a college, should not be wasted in merely academic pursuits.

But I was open to anything my students wanted to do, refusing to accept the idea that a teacher should confine his teaching to the classroom when so much was at stake outside it.

History is important. If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, those in power can tell you anything and you have no way of checking up on it.

I'll never forget that day." It confirmed what I learned from my Spelman years, that education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the

children forever.

The study of physics is also an adventure. You will find it challenging, some?times frustrating, occasionally painful, and often richly rewarding.

He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

I'm sure I must have sounded like a fool and a borderline psychotic most of that year, when I talked to people who thought they knew who and where they were at the time ... but looking back, I see that if I wasn't Right, at least I wasn't Wrong, and in that context I was forced to learn from my confusion ... which took awhile, and there's still no proof that what I finally learned was Right, but there's not a hell of a lot of evidence to show that I'm Wrong either.

Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle everyday? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything anther than galloping neurosis?

A lot of blood has gone under the bridge since then, and we have all learned a hell of a lot about the realities of Politics in America. Even the politicians have learned – but, as usual, the politicians are much slower than the people they want to lead.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing.

A great anatomist used to close his opening lecture to beginning medical students with words that apply equally to our own undertaking. "In this course," he would say, "we shall be dealing with flesh and bones and cells and sinews, and there are going to be times when it's all going to seem terribly cold-blooded. But never forget. It's alive!" II.

Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.

We need the courage as well as the inclination to consult, and profit from, the "wisdom traditions of mankind." —E.F. Schumacher In

Your reasoning is fine, but your experience is limited. Enlarge your experience, and your philosophy will be different.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you o with what happens to you.