Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

Education today is a process of filling the mind with the contents of books, emptying the contents in the examination hall and returning empty-headed.

The problem I have with schools is, people are taught, 'This is how you do this.' They're not taught about why you do this.

We send our kids off to school to major in labeling and think the ones who do it best deserve the highest grades.

The educational system is pretty much geared to passing the next exam. You're educated to pass tests and not to understand.

Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.

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.

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education.

[America] doesn't have an emphasis anymore on original discovery. Everything is based on teaching and learning for tests. Memorizing what you are taught, not on actually making discoveries. People are being treated as herded cattle instead of as human beings capable of making original, creative discoveries.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.

All subjects are the same. I memorize notes for a test, spew it, ace it, then forget it. What makes this scary for the future of our country is that I'm in the tip-top percentile on every standardized test. I'm a model student with a very crappy attitude about learning.

Actually, most mathematics courses do not teach reasoning of any kind. Students are so baffled by the material that they are obliged to memorize in order to pass examinations.

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.

Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.

Traditional education is based on facts and figures and passing tests - not on a comprehension of the material and its application to your life.

A diploma only proves that you know how to look up answers.

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.

Our education system is increasingly embracing a black-and-white way of thinking, in which 'learning' and 'play' are diametrically opposed. 'Learning' is the serious stuff that happens inside a classroom and can be measured via multiple choice questions and a No. 2 pencil. 'Play' is frivolous, fun, and worst of all, optional.

We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over

Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.

Formal education must change. It needs to be brought into closer alignment with the world as it actually is, into closer harmony with the way human beings actually learn and thrive.

Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.