Pearl S. Buck Quotes

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

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking.

It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.

The human being acquires a habit of learning. He learns to learn.

The possibility of observing the developments of the psychical life of the child as natural phenomena and experimental reactions transforms the school itself in action into a kind of scientific laboratory for the psychogenetic study of man.

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

There is hardly a more heart-thrilling pleasure enjoyed by mortals, than that which parents feel when seeing their child first being able to 'catch knowledge of objects.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

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

Children are not less intelligent than adults; what they are is less informed.

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

Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading.

The difference, so observable in men's understandings and parts, does not arise so much from their natural faculties, as acquired habits.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

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.

Parents fear the destruction of natural affection in their children. What is this natural principle so liable to decay? Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first. Why is not custom nature? I suspect that this nature itself is but a first custom, as custom is a second nature.

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it. and the love of knowledge, in a young mind, is almost a warrant against the inferior excitement of passions and vices.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

At the age of 18 I don't think that I thought very differently than I did at the age of 25. I think we instinctively have the knowledge and adapt the knowledge we need.

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.

That kind of natural understanding doesn't develop naturally

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.