The education of attention would be an education par excellence
Interpretation
Focusing on attention is the highest form of education one can achieve.
William James emphasizes the importance of cultivating attention as a vital skill in education. By learning to focus our attention, we can enhance our understanding and engagement with the world around us, making this form of education superior to others.
In practice
In a seminar discussing the importance of focus in learning, this quote can highlight how attention shapes our educational experiences.
Many persons nowadays seem to think that any conclusion must be very scientific if the arguments in favor of it are derived from twitching of frogs' legs (especially if the frogs are decapitated) and that, on the other hand, any doctrine chiefly vouched for by the feelings of human beings (with heads on their shoulders) must be benighted and superstitious.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association
As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.
There is considerable evidence that women's education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children
The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.
Schools must inquire deeper into their own practices, explore new ways to motivate their learners, make use of learning styles, introduce multiple intelligences, integrate learning, and teach thinking, and in the process discover the passion and moral purpose that makes teaching exciting and effective.
Many authors hate to go on grinding book tours. But I've always found it a useful way to be a foreign correspondent in America and take the pulse of the country.
Where one man reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me.
Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.