Alexander Pope Quotes

We think scientific literacy flows out of how many science facts can you recite rather than how was your brain wired for thinking. And it's the brain wiring that I'm more interested in rather than the facts that come out of the curriculum or the lesson plan that's been proposed.

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!

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.

When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: "We *know* all that!" "Oh," I say, "you *do*? Then no *wonder* I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

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.

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

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

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

I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.

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.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

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.

It was like a heart transplant. We tried to implant college in him but his head rejected it.

One of the great mind destroyers of college education is the belief that if it's very complex, it's very profound.

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

The education of a man is never completed until he dies.

When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.

I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up.

The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

I have a true aversion to teaching. The perennial business of a professor of mathematics is only to teach the ABC of his science; most of the few pupils who go a step further, and usually to keep the metaphor, remain in the process of gathering information, become only Halbwisser [one who has superficial knowledge of the subject], for the rarer talents do not want to have themselves educated by lecture courses, but train themselves. And with this thankless work the professor loses his precious time.

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.

The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.