Mortimer Adler Quotes

The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.

You don't actually need to know anything, you can find out at the point when you need to know it. It's the teachers job to point young minds towards the right kind of question, a teacher doesn't need to give any answers because answers are everywhere.

What is desired is that the teacher ceased being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.

It's not the teaching, it's the learning.

Participation, I think, or one of the best methods of educating.

We didn't set out to be educators or even scientists, and we don't purport that what we do is real science but we're demonstrating a methodology by which one can engage and satisfy your curiosity.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

What, of course, we want in a university is for people to learn the skills they're going to need outside the classroom. So, having a system that had more emphasis on inquiry and exploration but also on learning and practising specific skills would fit much better with how we know people learn.

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

Teachers have told us across the country that what's severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous. So instead, teachers want to help students learn how to think so that they can be lifelong learners.

The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Schools should be places to learn, not to teach.

Any piece of knowledge which the pupil has himself acquired- any problem which he has himself solved, becomes, by virtue of the conquest, much more thoroughly his than it could else be. The preliminary activity of mind which his success implies, the concentration of thought necessary to it, and the excitement consequent on his triumph, conspire to register the facts in his memory in a way that no mere information heard from a teacher, or read in a schoolbook, can be registered.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.

Teaching can be learning, especially if student curiosity with the question 'What's going on here?' can be elicited.

Many students learn best by doing. But because classrooms force the same pace on all students, they limit the degree to which students can truly learn through trial and error. Instead, lectures still force many students to follow material passively and in lockstep pace.