Utah Phillips Quotes

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.

Teaching can be learning, especially if student curiosity with the question 'What's going on here?' can be elicited.

Education is far less about a set of facts than a way of thinking, than learning how to critically think. And therefore, what I always think should be the basis of education is not answers but questions.

I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.

The best teachers aren't those who answer our questions, but those who question our answers.

My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another.

My job is not to produce answers. My job is to produce good questions.

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

I always say I have a Socratic approach to most things that I do. I pummel people with questions, because I need to know what they're thinking, what they're trying to achieve, what they believe the final outcome is going to be.

You've never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say.

The number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

Teachers may think they are stuffing minds, but all they are ever affecting is the memory. Nothing can ever be forced into anyone's mind except by brainwashing, which is the very opposite of genuine teaching.

Teaching how to think is better than lecturing how to do it.

What I've learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means "to pull from." Education does not mean jamming information into somebody's head. Rather, it's that ancient idea that all knowledge is within us; to teach is to help somebody pull it out of themselves.

The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.

Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative with our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed, to be unconscious of - others? Does the educational system exist in order to promulgate knowledge, or is its main function rather to universalize a society’s tacit agreement about what it has decided it does not and cannot know?

You've got to accept the fact that you are basically not teaching a subject, you are teaching children

Nothing is better for my playing than teaching because when you teach, you have to think and you have to listen what other people do. And then all of a sudden, you play yourself and then you say, my goodness, I don't need a teacher. I'm my own teacher. Then I can react to what I'm doing immediately. It really improves.

I'm a big believer in pose some questions and then answer a few of them before you move onto the next set of questions.

For my part, I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew.

I never give answers. I lead on from one question to another. That is my leadership.

In the Western tradition, we have focused on teaching as a skill and forgotten what Socrates knew: teaching is a gift, learning is a skill.

It's not enough to have the right answers. You have to have the right questions.

Don’t just teach your children to read… Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.