Margaret Mead Quotes

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.

It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think.

By playing games you can artificially speed up your learning curve to develop the right kind of thought processes.

Think your own thoughts.

The curiosity of the human mind is essential if you want citizens who think rather than accept the first nonsense they come to.

There is a dearth of thinking skills - people are taught what to think, not how.

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

Education must be aimed at creating a wider imagination in the child, not at suppressing. The child's mind must be set free.

The importance of all education lies far more in the training of minds than in any facts which may be absorbed, for trained minds will ascertain the facts as they need to know them. Having learned to reason and to weigh the information they discover, people with such minds will be more nearly educated than any amount of cramming of definite facts into their heads will make them.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

Our great mistake in education is ... the worship of book-learning-the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. ... We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children-to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavour to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts.

The object of education is not to fill a man's mind with facts; it is to teach him how to use his mind in thinking.

The Goal of Education is to Help People Use Their Minds Better

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.

It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.

When schools produce students who learned to think on the left or on the right, they're not thinking for themselves.

In our education system, we are taught to munch figures and remember them for lifetime. But does it help? We are not taught how to make decisions.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

I would argue that education, actual learning - it is hard work. It's very personal. Your parents don't teach you anything. Your teachers don't teach you anything. The government doesn't teach you anything. You read it. You don't understand it; you read it again. You break a pencil and read it again.