Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

If we taught children to speak, they'd never learn.

The more risks you allow your children to make, the better they learn to look after themselves.

What advice can we give to new mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.

The child becomes a person through work.

Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning...They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

The elements of instruction should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion.

How hard would it be to ask children what they see in their heads? How big should the house be in comparison to the family standing in front of it? What is it about the anatomy of the people that doesn't look right? Then let them try it again. Teach them to learn how to see and ask questions.

Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life.

Since it is through movement that the will realises itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act.

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.

I think the best way it happens is if parents say, this is important for educating my child.

Personally, I think it's a good way to let a child start right in with the laws of Nature before he's old enough to be surprised at them.

A child correct behind and not before.

Short version: For the child. . ., it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. . . . It is more important to pave the way for a child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts that he is not ready to assimilate.

I play with children so that I can learn from them.

In some small field each child should attain, within the limited range of its experience and observation, the power to draw a justly limited inference from observed facts.

Whenever the child is given the notion that he needs to be entertained, learning comes almost to a halt.

Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature.

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.

It's not the child's responsibility to teach the parent who they are. It's the parent's responsibility to learn who the child is.

Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development

Why, it is as easy to teach the name of an idea, if it is clearly formulated in the child's mind, as to teach the name of an object.

It is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses exists; not that the child shall know colors, forms or qualities, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, comparison and judgment.