E. F. Benson Quotes

I have been learning English on the road since I started when I was 15, so it is a slow process but making some progress. Now I think I am much more comfortable with my English. However, it is difficult, still, when I speak about something that is not tennis.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Education doesn't make you smarter.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

Reading taught me how to write.

Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

They don't like thinking in medical school. They memorize - that's all they want you to do. You must not think.

Making distinctions is part of learning. So is making mistakes.

You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

I think school is a place where thinking should be taught.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

You can only learn by opening yourself up to engage with different sources of information. How can you learn something if you never see it, read it, or hear it?

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

Education should prepare our minds to use its own powers of reason and conception rather than filling it with the accumulated misconceptions of the past.

In fourth grade, I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster 'comprehension.'

The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

We cannot create observers by saying 'observe', but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.