Jessie Mueller Quotes

I think the depth, what children can handle and what they're interested in, is much deeper than I think what people assume. I think it's why sometimes we make things too simple for them.

This is ridiculous, I mean, wholly ridiculous. It never did any child any harm to have something that was a tiny bit above them anyway, and I claim that anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow absolutely anything.

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

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.

The present practice is to impress one's own discoveries, opinions and principles on the child by constantly directing his actions. The last thing to be realised by the educator is that he really has before him an entirely new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to think over the things with which he comes in contact.

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

Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking.

Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

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.

I think kids slowly begin to realize that what they're learning relates to other things they know. Then learning starts to get more and more exciting.

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

Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.

I like information. I love when smart people make me think of something in a new way.

Children take in more information than we'd like to believe.

Education is all a matter of building bridges.

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.

I give the children education.

How we learn has nothing to do with how brilliant we are.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.

We need a serious intellectual culture in schools.

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

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.