Charles de Lint Quotes

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

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.

Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.

Scientists and philosophers tend to treat knowledge, imagination and love as if they were all very separate parts of human nature. But when it comes to children, all three are deeply entwined. Children learn the truth by imagining all the ways the world could be, and testing those possibilities.

All children know when something is wrong and they can't understand something - they never need someone to tell them they're stupid. They need help in solving the problem.

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?

Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.

Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.

Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.

The traditional educational theory is to the effect that the way to bring up children is to keep them innocent (i.e., believing in biological, political, and socioeconomic fairy tales) as long as possible ... that students should be given the best possible maps of the territories of experience in order that they may be prepared for life, is not as popular as might be assumed.

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.

What blockheads are those wise persons, who think it necessary that a child should comprehend everything it reads.

Children should be introduced right from the start to the potentialities of their environment, to the physical and psychological laws that govern the visual world, and to the supreme enjoyment that comes from participating in the creative process of giving form to one's living space.

Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

The development of a child is guaranteed in his curiosity to discover the cause behind each and every incident.

When dealing with children there is greater need for observing than of probing

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

What will a child learn sooner than a song?

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

Those people that don't see the power in art maybe have never been a part of an art, in a real way. To experience it, and to see and witness how it affects people, we're not doing it just to create professionals. It's to add another dimension to the way that children think and the way they experience certain things. If you didn't have dance, music and singing, it just seems so odd to me.

Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.