M. H. Abrams Quotes

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.

All teaching and all intellectual learning come about from already existing knowledge.

So a good teacher always makes you do something a little bit more than you thought that you could do.

Education is taken for granted. Teaching shops are different from building character.

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where ... the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.

You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him think.

Reading is more important than writing.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

The role of the educator is one of tranquil possession of certitude in regard to the teaching of not only contents but also of 'correct thinking.'

Great men in teaching weak men to reflect have set them on the road to error.

Education forms the common mind.

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

First the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect.

To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.

The mind must be trained, rather than the memory.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

The first indication of a young person's growing smarter is that he no longer understands the things which he used to consider quite intelligible and self-evident.

The education is the answer to everything, really, and on so many different levels. The minutiae of life require analytical skills that you learn in being educated, an ability to navigate the very systems that constitute life. They all require some degree of education, and if you don't get it, you're at a real disadvantage.

This is what an excellent teacher does; he does not follow his disciples' fancy everywhere, but leads them to his own mind, and pulls up the thorns, and then puts the seed in, and does not answer at once in all cases to the questions put to him.

Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.