Quotes About Learning

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.

School prepares people for the alienating institutionalization of life, by teaching the necessity of being taught. Once this lesson is learned, people loose their incentive to develop independently; they no longer find it attractive to relate to each other, and the surprises that life offers when it is not predetermined by institutional definition are closed.

A second major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

Schools themselves pervert the natural inclination to grow and learn into the demand for instruction.

School appropriates the money, men, and good will available for education and in addition discourages other institutions from assuming educational tasks. Work, leisure, politics, city living, and even family life depend on schools for the habits and knowledge they presuppose, instead of becoming themselves the means of education.

Les enfants sont par définition des apprentis, et apprendre est l'activité humaine qui nécessite le moins de manipulation par autrui. La majeure partie de l'apprentissage n'est pas le resultat de l'instruction. Elle serait plutôt le résultat d'une participation dans un environnement chargé de sens.

People who are successful succeed because they consider each mistake an opportunity to learn - not an excuse to quit.

What can I wish to the youth of my country who devote themselves to science? ...Thirdly, passion. Remember that science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.

Any significant input that is received in your brain triggers neural activity that cannot simply be erased or deleted as though it never happened.

To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.

Gradualness, gradualness, and gradualness. From the very beginning of your work, school yourself to severe gradualness in the accumulation of knowledge.

Education does not take place when you learn something you did not know before. Education is your ability to use what you have learned to be better today than you were yesterday.

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt.

As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.

The great secretary of Nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon.

So long as thou are ignorant be not ashamed to learn. Ignorance is the greatest of all infirmities, and when justified, the chiefest of all follies.

Experience assists wisdom because the universe has been designed to make it so.

Knowledge that is not being used for winning of further knowledge does not even remain- it decays and disappears.

Knowledge and wisdom, far from being one, Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells In heads replete with thoughts of other men: Wisdom, in minds attentive to their own. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much, Wisdom is humble, that he knows no more.

The leader who intends to grow spiritually and intellectually will be reading constantly.

Leaders should determine to spend a minimum of half an hour a day reading books that feed the soul and stimulate the mind.

Indeed, if we read merely to stock our head with ideas, to feel superior to others, or to appear learned, then our reading is useless and vain.