Bryant H. McGill Quotes

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

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

I still believe that education is about provoking some kind of original, creative thought.

Can watching video lessons or using interactive software make people smart? No. But I would argue that it can do something even better: create a context in which people can give free rein to their curiosity and natural love of learning so that they realize they're already smart.

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

Memory and creativity are essential to education, but if you teach memory incorrectly, it is a total waste of time, and it will inhibit learning.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts, but learning how to make facts live.

I'm raised to actually think, to use my brain.

The rare person is still interested in new advances when they are adults. There is possibly a correlation with intelligence. In any case, you have to be fairly bright to keep learning and changing attitudes as you get older.

You can teach students how to work; you can teach them technique - how to use reason; you can even give them a sense of proportions - of order. You can teach them general principles.

Always educate yourself.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

I always try to get people a different outlook. When you do that, people take ownership of the information. They don't ever have to reference me because, I'd like to believe as an educator, I'm empowering them to have those thoughts themselves.

Education must lead us from the irresponsible opinion to true responsible judgment. It must lead us from chance and arbitrariness to rational clarity and intellectual order. Therefore, let us guide our students over the road of discipline from materials, through function, to creative work.

You can only learn by opening yourself up to engage with different sources of information. How can you learn something if you never see it, read it, or hear it?

Of course everybody's thinking evolves over time. Only dead people cease learning, and I am not certified dead yet. So I am still learning.

In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.