Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

When the child sees the parent looking for something, it is as natural for it also to look for the object and to give it over when it finds it, as it was, under other circumstances, to receive it. Multiply such an instance by the thousand details of daily intercourse, and one has a picture of the most permanent and enduring method of giving direction to the activities of the young.

How children learn to use diverse sources of efficacy information in developing a stable and accurate sense of personal efficacy is a matter of considerable interest

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow.

If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Children have more need of models than of critics.

The fundamental purpose of schools is to grow adults.

Children always tend to imitate everything that we are doing in front of them.

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation

The way I see it, we teach our children through modeling.

Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.

Is not education the art of drawing out full manhood of the children under training?

The child will reveal himself through work.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

For children mastery entails struggle. This means they must be permitted to struggle. If parents inappropriately step in to "help"-out of impatience or solicitude-they sabotage important learning. Among other things, the child is unlikely to discover the advantages of perseverance and self-discipline.

Because psychologists have been able to discover, exactly as in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires knowledge and habits, the normal child has been vastly helped by what the retarded have taught us.

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.

Such knowledge is probably gained in several ways. One process undoubtedly operates through social comparison of success and failure experiences. Children repeatedly observe their own behavior and the attainments of others

How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?

I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.

Children are all more or less little monkeys in that they imitate everything they see. If their mother treats them exactly as she does her visitors they in turn play "visitor" to perfection. Nothing hurts the feelings of children more than not being allowed to behave like grown persons when they think they are able.

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.