Learning Quotes

We learn best when we care about what we are doing, when we have choices. We learn best when the work has meaning to us, when it matters. We learn best when we are using our hands and our minds.We learn best when the work we are doing is real and relevant.

~ Dennis Littky

Education is a lifetime assignment & terminates when you do.

~ Orrin Woodward

It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.

~ John Holt

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.

~ Howard Zinn

Education occurs when students set out to educate themselves… the student will only learn, can only learn, what he chooses to learn…(An) advantage of not pushing is an innate sense (his) education is (his) responsibility and reward.

~ Oliver Demille

Unless education promotes character making, unless it helps men to be more moral, more just to their fellows, more law abiding, more discriminatingly patriotic and public spirited, it is not worth the trouble taken to furnish it.

~ William Howard Taft

Why don't we want our children to learn to do mathematics? Is it that we don't trust them, that we think it's too hard? We seem to feel that they are capable of making arguments and coming to their own conclusions about Napoleon. Why not about triangles?

~ Paul Lockhart

No matter how righteous you are, no matter how carefully youcultivate the companionship of the Holy Ghost, there are vast amounts of knowledge which you need to acquireand which you are not going to receive through revelation.

~ Rex E. Lee

An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.

~ Martha C. Nussbaum

When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.

~ Brian S. Wesbury

Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative––to enable learning while traveling, or while in remote locations, or when one wishes to study a topic for which there is not easy access to teachers. Robot teachers will help make lifelong learning a practicality. They can make it possible to learn no matter where one is in the world, no matter the time of day. Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

~ Donald A. Norman

Training is a good dog, a constant companion and an utterly loyal and devoted friend, and everyone should have one. Education is a nagging counselor. And, I am convinced, everyone does have one. It happens, however, that some nagging counselors have grown strong by a certain kind of nourishment. Others are weak and puny, even infantile, having never been nourished at all.

~ Richard Mitchell

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

You learn almost as much about a thinker from what he reads—in particular, what he likes and what he disdains—as from what he writes himself.

~ Rodney Ulyate

Open the book and read it to renew your mind.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.

~ Michael Morpurgo

The objective of learning is not necessarily to remember. It may even be salutary to forget. It is only when we forget the early pains and struggles of forming letters that we acquire the capacity for writing. The adult does not remember all the history s/he learned but s/he may hope to have acquired a standard of character and conduct, a sense of affairs and a feeling of change and development in culture. Naturally there is nothing against having a well-stocked mind provided it does not prevent the development of other capacities. But it is still more important to allow knowledge to sink into one in such a way that it becomes fruitful for life; this best done when we feel deeply all we learn. For the life of feeling is less conscious, more dream-like, than intellectual activity and leads to the subconscious life of will where the deep creative capacities of humanity have their being. It is from this sphere that knowledge can emerge again as something deeply significant for life. It is not what we remember exactly, but what we transform which is of real value to our lives. In this transformation the process of forgetting, of allowing subjects to sink into the unconscious before re-membering them is an important element.

~ Henning Hansmann

Sine doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago [Without learning, life is but the image of death]

~ Dionysius Cato

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

~ John W. Gardner

Everyone is pretty good at learning. Very few are good at doing.

~ Richie Norton

Why, then,' answered the squire, 'I am very sorry you have given him so much learning; for, if he cannot get his living by that, it will rather spoil him for anything else; and your other son, who can hardly write his name, will do more at ploughing and sowing, and is in a better condition, than he.' And indeed so it proved; for the poor lad, not finding friends to maintain him in his learning, as he had expected, and being unwilling to work, fell to drinking, though he was a very sober lad before; and in a short time, partly with grief, and partly with good liquor, fell into a consumption, and died.

~ Henry Fielding

Experience is a necessary education.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Suddenly, I was plunged back into an avid learning environment, starting at the bottom and working my way painstakingly up the mountain. The thrill of learning and accomplishing stimulated me so much that the work was pleasurable.

~ Danielle Ofri

In chaos is where learning happens the most.

~ Tarun Sharma

Ignorance is the deepest sin of dark doom.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I do not consider my deeds or my knowledge to be a great thing. The only fact is — and I can say this honestly — that I love learning and a solitary life.

~ Christine De Pizan

Experience is the only subject worthwhile of study.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The greatest discovery is to be founded by God.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We are the witnesses of a barely perceptible transformation in ordinary language: verbs which formerly expressed satisfying actions have been replaced by nouns which name packages designed for passive consumption only -- 'to learn' becomes 'to accumulate credits'.

~ Ivan Illich

My education taught me a lot, but nothing I needed to learn.

~ Marty Rubin

What I must know, only the Master teaches!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

A library is chamber of treasures.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To read is to renew thy mind.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The act of reading is skill that can be cultivated.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

What we ought to know we never be taught in the classroom.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I finally understood that I didn’t lack pen and paper but my ownmemorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, calledrote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,a great human gift disowned.

~ Grace Paley

Life is education, it only end in death.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It is particularly important to note that, in a democracy, education has never been concerned only with supplying the needs of the economy or ensuring effective socialisation; it also has strong traditions of preparing for citizenship, extending possibilities for learning and promoting social progress.

~ Gaby Weiner

I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

You cannot know what I do not tell you, yet you will be judged harshly for not knowing.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich