Quotes on Learning

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

We've got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You've got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.

One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.

Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate, Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

All I really need to know... I learned in kindergarten.

You can learn much about life from a checker game: surrender one to take two; don't make two moves at one time; move up, not down; and when you reach the top, you may move as you like.

It's a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."

My basic idea is that programming is the most powerful medium of developing the sophisticated and rigorous thinking needed for mathematics, for grammar, for physics, for statistics, for all the "hard" subjects.... In short, I believe more than ever that programming should be a key part of the intellectual development of people growing up.

You aren't learning anything when you're talking.

It may be said "In research, if you know what you are doing, then you shouldn't be doing it." In a sense, if the answer turns out to be exactly what you expected, then you have learned nothing new, although you may have had your confidence increased somewhat.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.

Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.

The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Anyone who stops learning is old — whether this happens at twenty or at eighty. Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young but becomes constantly more valuable — regardless of physical capacity.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.