Michael Crichton Quotes

Most learning is social, or what I call the cultural DNA. Everyone knows that word of mouth advertising is the best advertising. That's social learning.

In every human society of which we have any record, there are those who teach and those who learn, for learning a way of life is implicit in all human culture as we know it. But the separation of the teacher's role from the role of all adults who inducted the young into the habitual behavior of the group, was a comparatively late invention. Furthermore, when we do find explicit and defined teaching, in primitive societies we find it tied in with a sense of the rareness or the precariousness of some human tradition.

Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.

To summarize, the particular song a male sings, and the behavioral responses of females to song and morphological signals, are not genetically inherited in a fixed manner but are determined by learning early in life.

In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

I feel like I'm always learning from people.

The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic, because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It's like being in a play; I'm always in a play.

Someone taught me how to eat properly. Learning from others is important when it's not working for yourself.

Because human nature evolved in an era before collective learning accelerated, we are all fitted to living in a world that does not change much after our formative years.

Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It's like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody's going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You're communicating. You're trying to learn and teach at the same time. You're your own student and you're your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.

Humans are more dependent on learning for survival than other species,We have no instincts that automatically find us food and shelter !

For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.

Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.

What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.

I had a wonderful teacher about animal behavior.

In undeveloped social groups, we find very little formal teaching and training. Savage groups mainly rely for instilling needed dispositions into the young upon the same sort of association which keeps adults loyal to their group. They have no special devices, material, or institutions for teaching save in connection with initiation ceremonies by which the youth are inducted into full social membership. For the most part, they depend upon children learning the customs of the adults, acquiring their emotional set and stock of ideas, by sharing in what the elders are doing.

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

The more you teach positive ideas to others, the better you learn them yourself.

Storytelling is the oldest form of education.

We are, in truth, more than half what we are by imitation.

The major weakness of all educational systems is that they neither teach nor encourage the habit of definite decision.

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. I am not a teacher, only a fellow student.

I do not teach children, I give them joy.